said by Fobulous:i have not setup QOS on my router even though it has that feature and my call quality is great with Viatalk. I would suggest you to try the VOIP without setting QOS and see what the quality is like before jumping into your router and setting all that up especially if you are kind of new to the world of routers.
As I mentioned, QoS is not "needed". I too used VoIP for a couple of years BEFORE getting a QoS router, so I know it can work.
However, the thing many people forget when they test things this way, is that most of us have much more DOWNLOAD bandwidth than UPLOAD. And in the case of VoIP, the download bandwidth controls what YOU hear on your phone, and the upload bandwidth controls what the person you are talking to hears. So when "testing your phone" this way, be SURE to try calling yourself (from another phone) and see what the sound quality is on that end. Because the odds are very good that if you are marginal for bandwidth, it is the people you are talking to that will suffer the sound problems, not you (since for most of us the "upload bandwidth" is much lower than the download bandwidth).
In my case, I only have 256k upload on my DSL line, even though I have 1.5meg download. And while that is easily enough to use VoIP with the normal CODECS (even enough to do a 3-way call, which uses twice the bandwidth, as it's really 2 calls in one), it still is easy to run into bandwidth problem when others are heavily using the internet. And this resulted in people sometimes telling me (before I got my QoS router) that my voice was breaking up and I needed to repeat what I said. While that still happens sometimes with the QoS router (i.e. QoS helps, but isn't a "cure all"), it happens much less often in my experience. And that is true even though I now never bother to tell the family to get off the internet because a call is in progress (where before QoS that happened sometimes). QoS makes that big of a difference, if/when setup properly!
And the thing many people need to remember, is that it's not just people "sending files" that use upload bandwidth! While normal "web browsing" mostly uses download bandwidth, it does use a little "upload" bandwidth as well to send the "I got the page" acknowledgements back to the web site. And the more download you use, the more upload you need for those "acks". So even just doing "web browsing" (I'm not even talking about "uploading files" or P2P here, just normal "you are viewing the web pages" browsing), you often do use more "upload" than you might realize. With QoS the "phone" (which is more "time critical", if you want good sound quality) gets its share first, than everything else goes. Without QoS, it's pretty much a crap-shoot as to which process will be at the head of the line for any bandwidth that is present. That doesn't mean that VoIP won't work in such an environment (especially if/when you have more than enough bandwidth for everything you want to do on the internet), just that QoS lets you "stack the deck" (in favor of good sound quality for VoIP), instead of depending upon "luck" that your VoIP adapter will get a large enough "piece of the pie" (for good sound quality)...