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Well, what an awesome month.

Diving back in over evenings this week, I found myself trying to deal more effectively with VoIP jitter, and inter-POP VPN latency, and international media sharing effectiveness.

Earlier this week, I stumbled on a new GPL tool .. MasterShaper .. via the good ‘ol Wikipedia under Traffic Shaping. In Debian it basically required a tarball dropped in the web document root and apt-cache pkgnames grep dependencieshere.Found good ‘ol nerim.net too! Great media support is back!.

Anyhow, after learning that IMQ patch allows some new interfaces just before or after the NAT stages (configurable) of the Netfilter engine, and reading about how HFSC has a guaranteed latency knob (for VoIP/Media anti-jitter), it became clear I could be making much better use of my bandwitch then plain old Wondershaper, WondershaperHTB-type scripts. (Which are great for non-jitter-sensitive data).

On another note, Evolution for Windows seems like a nice breather to personal groupware from foreign domains. Okay back to Work!
(Read on …)

Yesterday I had a Bell number, and today it rings through to a Vonage VOIP phone. If a Bell landline can become a Vonage number so easily, can I get them to grab my Bell cellphone number too.. and then give it to another carrier? I am sure number portability is feared by some of the big carriers here in Toronto, as I seem to know people who want to get away, or have switched from nearly all the big mobile phone companies. Many of my friends have stayed with their current carriers only because of the rumors of future number portability. Nobody likes to change their phone number. I expect that when this finally becomes possible, I will switch my number to Rogers, as they continue to provide a great Internet service.

After some experience working with VOIP startups in the 02-03 era, I was pleasantly surprised with Vonage’s VOIP service. The network configuration was notably simple, as I was able to plug it in behind an existing Debian firewall and it worked just fine. And the phone number hasn’t changed. Furthermore, with wondershaper enabled, I attempted to mess with the call by throttling the bandwidth. With consecutive 700kB/s downloads from kernel.org, I could not even make the call quality twitch. Disabling wondershaper added a few barely detectable artifacts to the call. I will try again sometime by jamming my more limited 100kB/s upstream bandwidth.