Calls intermittently going directly to voicemail

[usa2k]

Granted this is related to OLD threads
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,13561259
There have been modems that were the route cause of VoIP issues too.
(No pun intended!)

[Russell]

Russell,

Maybe I was not clear when I listed my NAT entries. My ATA uses 16384-16482 for both incoming and outgoing calls. It just increases by 4 after each call to get the next port number and cycles through the range again. I think this port number is communicated through the SIP packets. The adapter probably finds out the translated port number using STUN server if its used. I don't know a lot about how its communicated to the media gateway. The translated port number on the public side could be different depending on the router.

Yes, there are a lot of missing pieces of the puzzle which folks like me don't understand - e.g. what kind of negotiation of port number takes place. And, now that Tim has mentioned that "old" routers (which don't do any of the new fangled stuff work fine), how exactly do those routers know to let audio traffic from the media gateway in (e.g. is the ip address of the media gateway - different from the SIP server - part of the information that is exchanged in the negotiation)?

I have a really old router which worked fine with many VOIP companies and also with VOIPo until a couple of weeks ago. At that time I port forwarded. I'm tempted to undo port forwarding and restart all pieces after reading Tim's comment that old routers should work fine. Unfortunately, the wife volunteers three evenings this week and the phone needs to be "perfect" for any incoming calls - so it'll be next weekend before any such experiment.

My router does not appear to let me specify what type of traffic to forward - so presumably it's forwarding both TCP and UDP (and not just UDP).

[oldcqr]

I am getting very frustrated.

I find myself now needing to 'test' my service every few hours to ensure that it is working. Many times it is not. Today I find I am once again going directly to voicemail. Fri/Sat I was having problems with outgoing calls.

Most frustrating of all is that it appears that no one is even researching my problems. The ticket over the weekend was replied to with the 'forward all the ports' reply. I've had the port forwarding in place for several weeks now.

I know the Voipo staff can tell if the ports are forwarded or not, since they caught that I had not forwarded them on a previous ticket (I had the entry but forgot to enable it). That tells me the rep didn't even bother to check anything.

[VOIPoTim]

I know the Voipo staff can tell if the ports are forwarded or not, since they caught that I had not forwarded them on a previous ticket (I had the entry but forgot to enable it). That tells me the rep didn't even bother to check anything.

Unfortunately, they can only tell if the SIP port is forwarded. There is no way for us to know if you forwarded all.

If it has ALG or a SPI firewall, these will also likely need to be disabled.

I know it's frustrating, but unless the router allows the traffic through fully, there's not much we can do on our end. We can't really force your router let traffic through from our end. We're happy to help you review the router configuration to see what can be adjusted to open it up.

If you have a ticket number, I'm happy have a Tier II rep contact you to review your router settings.

[oldcqr]

I just opened up remote administration to my router, and placed the information into the ticket I have open for your support to access it.

PPV-307843