Background
Ooma has engineered the Quality of Service (QoS) feature to greatly enhance overall voice quality under congested network conditions. For example, if you are on an Ooma phone call and decide to engage in several network bandwidth intensive tasks (such as a BitTorrent upload, sending a large email attachment, streaming a Slingbox video to a friend), the person on the other end of the phone call may complain about your voice dropping out during a call. With QoS enabled, your voice will sound clear even under congested network conditions.
It is important to install the Ooma Hub or Telo directly behind your Internet modem ("MODEM" or "TO INTERNET" port) and before any devices ("HOME" or "HOME NETWORK" port) that can generate traffic so that ooma can intelligently prioritize voice traffic over other traffic.
By default, Quality of Service is only enabled in the upstream direction, since Internet service providers typically only allocate a small upstream data speed compared to the downstream data speed. For example, a typical DSL connection might have 384 kbps upstream and 3 Mbps downstream. As a result of the reduced bandwidth available, most voice quality issues occur in the upstream direction. This guide will step through configuring QoS in the upstream direction. If desired, a similar procedure can be followed to configure QoS in the downstream direction.
Configuration
No configuration is required to enable QoS, since it is enabled by default in the upstream direction. However, to obtain the best results, it is recommended to adjust the default upstream bandwidth (384 kbps) to the true upstream bandwidth available on your network. If you do not know your upstream bandwidth, you can find out the value using a speed test website, such as speedtest.net.
Example speedtest.net upload results
Speed test websites typically call your upstream bandwidth speed the "upload speed". To ensure you are obtaining accurate results, be sure to run the speed tests only when you have no active data transfers. Also, it is best to run the speed test several times to ensure you are obtaining consistent results.
After you determine the upstream speed, open the Ooma setup page by browsing to http://setup.ooma.com from a computer connected behind the "HOME" port of the Ooma device.
On the setup page, select "Advanced" on the navigation menu and look for the "Quality of Service" section on the page. In the "Upstream Internet Speed" textbox, type in the numeric upstream speed result from the Internet speed test. Note: The units of the upstream speed on the setup page are in kilobits per second (kbps), so if you obtained an upstream value in megabits per second (Mbps) you would convert the value to kbps before typing it into the input field.
After typing in the value be sure to click the Update button to save the changes.
To learn more about Ooma QoS, check out the Learning more about Ooma Quality of Service (QoS) article.