This month is the one year mark of working primarily from home. Generally, I think it’s been a major improvement to our family’s lifestyle, and with that extra two hours I get every work day, I’ve been able to:
- Spend more time with Tammy, Miranda and Ian
- Enjoy a variety of extra activities, like more time for playing guitar, exercise
- Doing work around the yard
The last one is of particular interest: this year for the first time I’ve been able to keep on top of the yardwork so that I’m heading into some vacation without a huge backlog of work to get done.
I got a chance recently to speak to my boss about the situation (since I only see him once or twice a year) and he hasn’t regretted offering this situation to me. He hasn’t received any complaints. The only fly in the ointment that he was aware of was when I recently gave a demo to himself and another ESRI Canada employee in Vancouver. I was demonstrating some software over a web screen-sharing system and speaking on the phone. The problem was not in the demo or the software, it was that my voice was getting garbled when a lot of stuff was happening on-screen. Last November, we switched from Telus to Vonage for our home phone. This was primarily in support of working from home, having the ability to call pretty much anywhere for free. Since I am on the phone all the time with people in Vancouver and points east, it made sense.
However, it appears that when I am making heavy use of the upload bandwidth, the voice-over-IP internet phone suffers. So I did some research, and found that there are routers which can prioritize different types of network traffic. They are primarily directed at online video games, but VOIP quality is another use for them. So I ordered a D-Link DGL-4100 from TigerDirect and it arrived yesterday. I have got it set up and working, but I haven’t really put it through its paces. I’ve enabled the QOS technology and some preliminary tests using TestYourVOIP indicated some improvements. Fingers crossed that this is an effective solution.
Be interested to see how it goes. Our Router went funky the other night so I upgraded the firmware and unfortunately it flushed all of the Settings I had in there.
I tried to restore the settings I had backed up but, it didn’t seem to like’em.
I may phone Vonage again and have them remind me what they are. There was a little bit of a difference after I did that.
I also put my Vonage adapter out in the DMZ as suggested by Vonage.
I’m a little ticked off as we are now Experiencing a "Caller ID" issue with friends whom are Telus Customers.
I’m going to call them tonight and see if i can’t get it straightened out.
Why did Vonage suggest that the adapter be put in the DMZ?
For updating the device and i guess full access to bandwidth?