Lots of dropped calls, Loss of Registration issues

[voipinit]

Figure I'd chime in - after 2+ years of near flawless service, I am having (and been having for the last couple weeks) the exact problems described in this thread. For example, today, I tried making an outbound call, it was dead air after dialing so I gave up and called the person on my cell phone. ~20 seconds into the call, the person I was talking to on the cell phone said your home phone is calling my office number (the number I called on the VOIPo line). When I picked up my home phone, sure enough it was ringing even though it was on hook for at least the last 30 seconds. This should NOT happen and is NOT an ISP problem, NOT a router problem, NOT an ATA problem, so what's left? a capacity issue? or some other issue NOT on the customers end. Brandon, I know your expertise and know you can fix this, it is a real issue.

[WHiZ]

The past 2 days i've had the same issue as well and it's causing major issues not being able to get or make calls. Things had improved and had been working fine for weeks. But now incoming calls are not ringing through. Outbound calls get me dead air, if i hang on long enough i get a dial tone again.

[VOIPoBrandon]

Figure I'd chime in - after 2+ years of near flawless service, I am having (and been having for the last couple weeks) the exact problems described in this thread. For example, today, I tried making an outbound call, it was dead air after dialing so I gave up and called the person on my cell phone. ~20 seconds into the call, the person I was talking to on the cell phone said your home phone is calling my office number (the number I called on the VOIPo line). When I picked up my home phone, sure enough it was ringing even though it was on hook for at least the last 30 seconds. This should NOT happen and is NOT an ISP problem, NOT a router problem, NOT an ATA problem, so what's left? a capacity issue? or some other issue NOT on the customers end. Brandon, I know your expertise and know you can fix this, it is a real issue.

This definitely sounds odd -- but my first question I am going to ask -- was there ANY intermediate connection between our device and the phone? Was this a VOIPo device?

The reason I am asking is because from the description it is pretty clear that there was some kind of disconnect or interference or extreme latency between the point of you making the call, hanging up, and the call still progressing.

If you could PM me the Call-ID in this case I would be happy to further look into it for you, however I can almost guarantee you that this is one of the above 'problem descriptions' I described above.

Simply put - if you make a call, it sends an INVITE to our servers which 'initiates' the call and we proxy this further upstream and terminate it to the 'PSTN'.

If you hang up the phone BEFORE the call connects a CANCEL should be sent to cancel out that INVITE / branch(s) that were created due to that INVITE in the original initiation of the call.

If our network does not receive a CANCEL we will continue to route that call to the public network as we are simply not 'notified' simply put that the call was actually terminated.

So with this said the initial delay could be a result of simply a bad network connection between your and our network OR a bad route that we happened to terminate this specific call to at the time of this call.

The failure of notification of the cancellation of that call could be due to several variables, i.e. interference from house wiring where the point of loop / current disconnect from the phone did not actually notify our ATA on a "analog" level as in your connection from phone to device / ATA, or at a "network" level.

So as you can see there are many many potential variables involved in this particular scenario and I would still not rule out this being an issue originating from the clients end.

If anyone is able to consistently reproduce issues lets schedule a date & time and I would be more than happy to look into each and every one's individual scenario and see if we can't rule out possibilities and any potential issues.

While I understand it may seem like several of you are having issues in all reality it is a very very very small fraction of our customer base -- each and every customer of ours is a very important part of our business and I am looking forward to doing what we can to resolve any potential issues you may be experiencing.

So I look forward to working with you all. Keep me updated with any Call Reference ID's of problematic calls that you come across. You can locate this in your call history by clicking on "Call From" or "Call To" for the applicable problematic call entry.

Also let me know your availability (anyone) that is having an issue and I would be happy to personally work with you and interactively look into the issue.

[burris]

Brandon....

Excellent explanation of how it works...as well as an offer that anyone in trouble should not pass up..

I don't know of any other provider who comes to the table as VOIPo does when it comes to dealing with its customers.

[christcorp]

Having played with this stuff for a very long time, I decided to do some forced reboots and registration.

1. I rebooted the voipo adapter. That didn't seem to do much. Many inbound calls still rang, but dead air when I answered. Outbound no problems.
2. I rebooted my router. Same as #1. Inbound calls were still hit or miss as far as connecting or getting dead air. Outbound still never been a problem.
3. I then logged into vpanel and in beta, assigned my virtual number to port 2 of the adapter. Rebooted adapter and forced server to re-register. I then changed it back to primary number; rebooted and forced the server to re-register. Finally, did it a 3rd time and assigned the virtual number to port 2 of the adapter; rebooted, and forced the server to re-register.

I've only experimented with 3 inbound calls. 1 from a POTS line and 2 from 2 separate cell phones. So far, ALL 3 inbound calls worked fine. No more dead air. I'll monitor for the next few days to see how it goes. Also, FWIW, I don't use QOS, Port Forwarding, or DMZ on my router. I have 30mb down and 5mb up internet, so QOS isn't an issue.<br><br>For those who don't have a virtual number to play with and force re-registration; I'm sure you all have failover established. Probably to your cell phone. Simply unplug the power to the voip adapter and LEAVE it unplugged. It will take a few minutes, but the servers will go to failover and forward calls to your cell or wherever you told it to. When you know your inbound calls are in fact being "Failedover" (If that's a word); simply plug back in your voip adapter and allow the voipo server to re-register with the adapter. See if this helps. Like I said, I'm simply experimenting, and I figured it couldn't hurt to force my account to be rebooted. No promises, but so far, (3 calls), mine is working better. I'll comment tomorrow to say if I got any more dead air inbound calls. later... mike...

[christcorp]

Brandon....

Excellent explanation of how it works...as well as an offer that anyone in trouble should not pass up..

I don't know of any other provider who comes to the table as VOIPo does when it comes to dealing with its customers.

+1. Tim and Brandon have always provided the best customer service available.
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P.S. I'm going to add to this reply, because for some reason, I'm unable to reply to this thread directly. (Probably me). Anyway; here's some advice/experiment. Mike....
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Having played with this stuff for a very long time, I decided to do some forced reboots and registration.
1. I rebooted the voipo adapter. That didn't seem to do much. Many inbound calls still rang, but dead air when I answered. Outbound no problems.
2. I rebooted my router. Same as #1. Inbound calls were still hit or miss as far as connecting or getting dead air. Outbound still never been a problem.
3. I then logged into vpanel and in beta, assigned my virtual number to port 2 of the adapter. Rebooted adapter and forced server to re-register. I then changed it back to primary number; rebooted and forced the server to re-register. Finally, did it a 3rd time and assigned the virtual number to port 2 of the adapter; rebooted, and forced the server to re-register.

I've only experimented with 3 inbound calls. 1 from a POTS line and 2 from 2 separate cell phones. So far, ALL 3 inbound calls worked fine. No more dead air. I'll monitor for the next few days to see how it goes. Also, FWIW, I don't use QOS, Port Forwarding, or DMZ on my router. I have 30mb down and 5mb up internet, so QOS isn't an issue.<br><br>For those who don't have a virtual number to play with and force re-registration; I'm sure you all have failover established. Probably to your cell phone. Simply unplug the power to the voip adapter and LEAVE it unplugged. It will take a few minutes, but the servers will go to failover and forward calls to your cell or wherever you told it to. When you know your inbound calls are in fact being "Failedover" (If that's a word); simply plug back in your voip adapter and allow the voipo server to re-register with the adapter. See if this helps. Like I said, I'm simply experimenting, and I figured it couldn't hurt to force my account to be rebooted. No promises, but so far, (3 calls), mine is working better. I'll comment tomorrow to say if I got any more dead air inbound calls. later... mike...

[christcorp]

Having a problem replying to this thread. I'll try again.
******************************
Having played with this stuff for a very long time, I decided to do some forced reboots and registration.

1. I rebooted the voipo adapter. That didn't seem to do much. Many inbound calls still rang, but dead air when I answered. Outbound no problems.
2. I rebooted my router. Same as #1. Inbound calls were still hit or miss as far as connecting or getting dead air. Outbound still never been a problem.
3. I then logged into vpanel and in beta, assigned my virtual number to port 2 of the adapter. Rebooted adapter and forced server to re-register. I then changed it back to primary number; rebooted and forced the server to re-register. Finally, did it a 3rd time and assigned the virtual number to port 2 of the adapter; rebooted, and forced the server to re-register.

I've only experimented with 3 inbound calls. 1 from a POTS line and 2 from 2 separate cell phones. So far, ALL 3 inbound calls worked fine. No more dead air. I'll monitor for the next few days to see how it goes. Also, FWIW, I don't use QOS, Port Forwarding, or DMZ on my router. I have 30mb down and 5mb up internet, so QOS isn't an issue.

For those who don't have a virtual number to play with and force re-registration; I'm sure you all have failover established. Probably to your cell phone. Simply unplug the power to the voip adapter and LEAVE it unplugged. It will take a few minutes, but the servers will go to failover and forward calls to your cell or wherever you told it to. When you know your inbound calls are in fact being "Failedover" (If that's a word); simply plug back in your voip adapter and allow the voipo server to re-register with the adapter. See if this helps. Like I said, I'm simply experimenting, and I figured it couldn't hurt to force my account to be rebooted. No promises, but so far, (3 calls), mine is working better. I'll comment tomorrow to say if I got any more dead air inbound calls. later... mike...

[burris]

Mike....

I like your thinking but maybe we need to separate those with BYOD vs. VOIPo supplied. Where VOIPo supplied the devices they remain provisioning enabled and I would think that any configs and such could be done on line by them. In fact I believe one could do a factory reset and if in a passthrough mode, will be re-provisioned online. If so, that might do a complete re-registration. Don't know about those who usethe box for ATA/router combo.
For those with their own boxes such as you and I have, lots of things could be tried. I'm also from the do it yourself school but since I'm getting older and older, I have had excellent success by keeping my boxes with provisioning enabled. With my SPA 2102 which is my favorite by the way, VOIPo doesn't have online provisioning but I have mirrored all the settings they supply from my PAP2T and GS502.

[christcorp]

looks like some of my posts caught up. LOL!!!!

Anyway; it's been about 24 hours or so. I did 4 more inbound calls. 1 from a POTS line and 3 from 3 different cell phones. I purposely answered one on the first ring, and the others at various points such as 2nd ring and 3rd ring. (Obviously I could go past that or voicemail would kick in). Anyway; I was able to receive and talk both ways on all 4 calls. So I think it's worth a try for some who are having an issue. The easiest method to force the server to get involved and re-register, is to power off your voip adapter. Doesn't matter if it's provided by VoipO or you have your own. Leave it off and let the voipo server go to failover. You should be getting calls to your cell phone if that's your failover. Or to voicemail if that's how you have it set up. If you don't have failover configured or don't know what I'm talking about, just power off your voip adapter before you go shopping and leave it off until you get home. Then, when you're sure that the servers are re-routing to failover, plug your adapter back in and power it up. Give it a few minutes to not only re-establish a connection, but for the server to route normally. So far it's worked for me, but I don't have a large enough sampling size to be 100% sure. I like to play and experiment, and while computers can be useful, we all know they can be finicky. And a voip system is nothing more than computers. Anyway; that's my $0.0284848389 (inflation). Mike.....

[tritch]

Most of the dropped/dead air calls seemed to have gone away. There was a dropped call yesterday, but this was addressed by Brandon. Hopefully, this fixes the issue.

We've been experiencing a bit of this also...but on some of those calls, if we remain on the line for an extra moment and the caller does as well, it seems to connect after a few extra seconds. Sounds strange but these kinds of things are hard to diagnose.

Burris,

My father started having this issue within the last month or so. About 10-20% of his incoming calls have a 1-2 second delay after answering the call before his phone begins to transmit audio. You often don't hear "Hello" or the first few words that he speaks after he answers the phone, then it starts to work normally. Is this the same issue you're talking about? If so, do you have your SPA2102 registered to the BYOD server? Are you still experiencing this random issue? If not, what did you do to fix it? I'm hesitant to blame Voipo for this issue because we both have the same setup with a SPA2102 and I don't experience this issue at all. The only difference is that I'm registered to sip-central01 and he's registered to the BYOD server. BTW, I should mention that I did have him try hooking up a hardwired phone instead his cordless phone to the ATA, but it didn't seem to make any difference.