2 problems with Voicemail - 13 seconds to connect to it and touch tones don't work?

[babaganoosh]

I've been working with Voipo support for a couple weeks now in back and forth emails with this problem. Wonder if others have the same issue(s) or had them and were able to resolve them?

First, we have 2 voipo ATA boxes / 2 seperate phone lines. 1 box is a Grandstream and 1 is Linksys.

On the Linksys phone line, everything works fine... From any phone in the house, we can dial 123 and get to voicemail within about 2 seconds. The woman says 'welcome'...
And touch tones work fine to listen / delete, etc.

This box is set to use ports 5078 & 5079 and I have port forwarding set up in the house's router to forward to the static IP of the Linksys.

The problem is with the other line, with the grandstream. That uses ports 5065 & 5098. Again, I have port forwarding for those ports going to the static IP for the grandview. (we had been getting calls with no caller ID or 'ASTERISK' and no one there and the calls weren't showing up in the voipo incoming call log when it had the 'standard' ports so they changed to these 2 ports figuring it was hackers causing the ghost calls?).

On this line, from any phone in the house, when you dial 123, it takes about 13 seconds for the 'welcome...'. And touch tones do not work (yes, this happens from the same phones that work fine calling the Linksys line, can make outgoing calls with no problems with either box, can operate touch tone driven systems when we call, etc (I don't think it's a question of the touch tones on all the phones in the house being slightly 'off').

We've had voipo service for probably a year now and only recently started using voicemail (it's been on, but we had an answering machine in the house that would answer before voipo voicemail would. We disconnected the answering machine recently and now notice this problem with 1 line).

Again, we've been in touch with Voipo support and they've been trying some things to no avail.

I am curious if anyone is thinking 'yeah, I never thought about it but it takes a long time to connect on 123 for me also' or something like that. What type of ATA do you have? Maybe it's just brand loyalty, but the Linksys line seems more reliable - no ghost phone calls, quicker connecting to 123, etc...

Or if you had this problem and solved it?

1 thing I did notice is that disabling then enabling voicemail on the troubled line from the voipo website got the 13 seconds down to 8, at least right after doing that. But now, a few days later, it's back to 13.

This certainly isn't a huge deal - we're checking voicemail from the website. It just would be nice to have 123 as an option also.

take care!

[Russell]

What happens on the Grandstream if you press # after the 123? Does it speed it up?

[babaganoosh]

Yeah! That gets 'welcome' after about 3 seconds which is what it takes when calling from the other line!

So

a) what's that mean / what's the # doing? Saying 'that's the end of what I am going to enter', I guess?
b) is there a way to not have to enter # to get the 3 second response?
c) is 3 seconds the typical response time to get to voicemail?

[babaganoosh]

I was real psyched you nailed a work around so quick and was looking at your profile - you make a point to say you run multiple ATAs? Mind if I ask how many? (all on the same LAN?). Is that configuration reliable? You have seperate pairs of ports for each ATA? And port forward the pairs to each ATA? Do you know what the upper limit is on different ATAs you can run on 1 lan?

Thanks!

[babaganoosh]

Oh, Russell, another thing:

What brand(s) of ATA do you use? Any preference for brand of ATA? Grandstream vs. Linksys vs. whose else does Voipo supply? Or for the end user, it's all the same?

Are these in front of the computers at your location? (and I guess you are using the NAT of at least 1 of the ATAs for that?) or are the PCs and the ATAs in the same subnet / all connected to the same router?

Thanks!

[babaganoosh]

If it does not recognize as complete it'll wait for a while and then send it anyway, which explains the long pause.

is there a way to teach the grandstream that if I dial 123, there's nothing else after it? can I do that? Or can Voipo? Should voipo techs know this? I have 5+ emails from them over the last couple weeks about this, with them trying things behind the scenes.

[Russell]

Oh, Russell, another thing:

What brand(s) of ATA do you use? Any preference for brand of ATA? Grandstream vs. Linksys vs. whose else does Voipo supply? Or for the end user, it's all the same?

Thanks!

I've tried several. Unfortunately, I've yet to find one which works perfectly for my situation :-(.

[Russell]

I was real psyched you nailed a work around so quick and was looking at your profile - you make a point to say you run multiple ATAs? Mind if I ask how many? (all on the same LAN?). Is that configuration reliable? You have seperate pairs of ports for each ATA? And port forward the pairs to each ATA? Do you know what the upper limit is on different ATAs you can run on 1 lan?

Thanks!

Only one VOIPo ATA. One think I dislike about the VOIPo architecture is the requirement to port-forward UDP ports 5004-65000 to your device for reliable service. Not sure how you can place more than one VOIPo ATAs reliably behind a router given that requirement - someone from VOIPo may comment on this. Do note since I just run one VOIPo ATA, the requirement to me is a minor negative compared with the positives of VOIPo. I've played with a second one (on and off). Actually have a "cracked" Vonage RT31P2 in service at the current time. Currently my VOIPo device (PAP2T) and Vonage device are behind my UVerse modem+router box with the previously mentioned ports forwarded to the PAP2T.

[babaganoosh]

you said:

I dislike about the VOIPo architecture is the requirement to port-forward UDP ports 5004-65000 to your device for reliable service


I don't have that set up (and things are working (relatively) good). How critical is that? I heard that mentioned somewhere as recommended.

And I did see you say you aren't techie, I'm always wondering how things DO work without port forwarding of the 2 ports. It's just 'recommended' to forward those ports.

Seems it should or shouldn't work. Either the router keeps out the inbound packets or they ride in on the reply to packets sent out from inside the LAN.

I need / want to learn more about Voip (and I guess voipo - that forwarding of a wide range of ports isn't part of 'true' Voip? Voip and voipo are different?

Thanks!

[Russell]

Essentially, it's a dial plan issue. There are patterns of digits which are recognized as a complete set of numbers and sent (when recognized) by the device to the server. 123 is recognized by the Linksys but not by the Grandstream. # sends the preceding string on its way. If it does not recognize as complete it'll wait for a while and then send it anyway, which explains the long pause.