okay, so a friend of mine is living at home (taking the semester off), where his parents have cable, internet, and voip all through time warner...he has his own linksys voip modem from living on his own and he'd like to keep his number (i mean, it costs next to nothing)...the problem is that they only have cable jacks downstairs (he lives upstairs), and even then the cable modem (and wireless router) is on the opposite side of the house and down a level

he can get a wireless signal upstairs in his room, but it's either "low" or "very low"...so problem number 1 is that he wants to get good reception up there...obvious solution: wireless access point (though i don't actually know - does an ap have to plug into an existing internet connection or will it relay an already established wireless connection and act as a repeater?)

problem 2 is that he'd like to have his voip modem line in his room so he doesn't have to go downstairs every time the phone rings...

my issue: i've never worked with an access point, and don't even know what the back looks like, so i don't know if it has an ethernet jack that he could hook the voip modem up to (and even then, would the ap work with the voip modem in that way?)

my second issue: i have a spare linksys wrt54g (the same wireless router they have at his house)...can you run it in access point mode? will the router do that? i had a belkin that WOULD do that (and i really hate belkin, for the most part)...but it only work with other belkin products

1/9/2006 6:51:46 PM

has no one ever tried this?

1/10/2006 12:40:44 AM

You can overcome the connection issue with wireless, but I don't think it will turn out so hot. Chances are his voice quality will suffer.

Quote :

"my second issue: i have a spare linksys wrt54g (the same wireless router they have at his house)...can you run it in access point mode? will the router do that? i had a belkin that WOULD do that (and i really hate belkin, for the most part)...but it only work with other belkin products"

I'm 90% sure you can load up 3rd party firmware and it will do this.

1/10/2006 6:39:27 AM

yeah...i looked into that...we both have version 5, which uses a proprietary os (as opposed to the versions before which use linux)...so that's not an option

1/10/2006 9:38:17 AM

The biggest problem, if you try this, as gephelps pointed out is that voice quality will suffer. Those linksys routers don't have any QoS on the wireless, so any other data that's concurrent with voice traffic is going to cause jitter.

1/10/2006 10:13:36 AM

What about the VoIP routers using the same port for SIP?

1/10/2006 10:39:13 AM

anyone else know more?

1/10/2006 7:34:27 PM

Quote :

"can you run it in access point mode? will the router do that?"

Turning off NAT/PAT, DHCP, and the firewall should make it akin to an AP.

1/11/2006 12:49:26 AM