said by gwbuffalo:said by NetFixer:That sounds like familiar advice.
It is familiar advice, it is exactly what I told her four days ago when you replied with "...the problems you are describing don't sound like anything that port forwarding would fix..." I guess they were exactly the kinds of problems that port forwarding / getting out from behind the firewall will fix!
And unless the PhonePower ATA is not properly establishing a session, it is still my opinion that DMZ or port forwarding will not fix the OP's VoIP problems. Her problem sounds more like a QoS or rate limiting problem to me than it does a SIP problem. However, on the off chance that the PhonePower ATA's SIP logic is defective, it certainly can't hurt to try using a DMZ or port forwarding just to see if it might help.
If the OP can find the courage to try to setup port forwarding, or a DMZ, then perhaps she can also see if her cable gateway box also has QoS and/or rate limiting settings. Based on the reported symptoms, I suspect that if the OP runs the
ICSI Netalyzr test to verify if she has excessive buffering, and then runs the
ShaperProbe test and sets up outbound rate limiting to a value just slightly higher than the base upstream bandwidth shown by
ShaperProbe, that might have a chance to correct her VoIP problems. If I did not do that, my Vonage service would have the same long transmission delays that the OP describes (and my Vonage adapter is not behind a router or firewall). In the OP's case (since she is also doing video streaming over the gateway's WiFi), she might possibly need both rate limiting to compensate for excessive upstream buffering, and QoS to give her PhonePower ATA priority over other traffic (this is of course assuming that her Comcast supplied gateway gives the customer access to those settings...Comcast has a tendency to lock down their gateway boxes).