Need help with QoS/Port opening/Port Forwarding

[valeriekay123]

I know just enough about computers to get me in trouble (which isn't a lot).

I 'm running a Dell with XP Professional v. 5.1.2600, Intel Pentium 4, 1.65 GHz, 512 MB RAM. I have Roadrunner cable which generally gets 6,500-7,000kb/s down and 450-500kb/sec up. Webstar modem, Linksys WRT54GL v. 1.1 with tomato firmware. In my home, I have three roommates and a total of 5 computers that may connect into my network at any given time and 3 of those have Magic Jacks. One of the computers with a MJ connects via wire to the router.

I previously tried to use dd-wrt to set up QoS, but whenever I enabled it, it disabled all internet connections. After finding on other forums that some others were having similar issues, I switched to tomato.

Using tomato, I set up QoS using 85% of my up and down speeds, but the call quality remains quite choppy, despite trying two different corded phones. Now my roommates are complaining that the down speed is barely above dialup speeds (even when nobody is using the phone and only 2 or 3 computers are surfing the web).

I went through MJ's tech support [s]hell[/s] chat and after an hour, they suggested I open ports UDP 5060-5070 and TCP 80 and TCP 443. I was able to open the UDP ports fine, but when I went to do the TCP 80 it was already in my ports list (but unchecked) as the port for the Web Server (http). Port 443 was also already in the ports list (also unchecked) as the port for the Secure Web Server (https). Because they were already in the list, I checked those. Nothing changed with the down speed or the call quality, so I unchecked them, still with the same result.

Do I need to also forward the ports once I open them? If so, how? I have literally spent days working on this, reading this forum and trying to figure out what to do and am at my wit's end. Any other suggestions as to what I can do to get the call quality to be decent and not have such slow internet speeds?

I forgot to add, even when I disable QoS, the call quality remains choppy.

Thank you in advance for any assistance or suggestions!

[VaHam]

You may want to checkout http://www.phoneservicesupport.com/dd-wrt-fixing-my-voip-and-wifi-problems-t919.html?highlight=ddwrt
It is for DD-WRT but the basic settings info would apply to any router.