Switched from Vonage and my troubles started

First of all, I want to say that the tech support is great. Very responsive and knowledgeable.

The rest of this email is about what I see as a fundamental flaw in the product that VOIPO offers. Namely the fact that, in order to get reliable inbound and outbond calls, ports 5004-65000 need to be available and forwarded to the ATA. In my case a Grandstream HT502.

This is just not a nice thing to do. One device on my LAN should not have to claim almost the full range of available ports. In my case, I cannot give the ATA all these ports. I have ports in use for other devices, several assigned through UPNP.

I will spare you the long and lengthy ways tech support and I are (still) trying to work around this. (If interested, I'll provide details). However, I am not getting answers to three basic questions from tech support, which I hope you guys can answer:

1) Is there a smaller range of ports that the HT502 really needs? So that I can forward a smaller range?
2) Failing that, is there a different ATA that voipo supports that doesn't have this issue?
3) Why is that I *never* had these issues with Vonage (was a customer for 5 years) on the exact same network setup? All I did was unplug the Vonage adapter and plugged in the Voipo provided one, and my troubles started :-(

I can totally see that someone not interested in trouble shooting, or technically capable, that will just give up when they run into the issue that half their calls only have one-way audio. I myself have spent hours and my wife is about ready to kill me. This is really frustrating I am really close of just switching back to Vonage. This aggrevation is not worth it. However, I would really like to have a solid and robust solution with Voipo.

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance for helping!

I'm interested in the answer to this post. I too wonder how Vonage and others are able to provide service with a more limited number of ports.

I googled Vonage Ports and found this link. Looks like they use 10,000 to 20,000 range, plus a few select others.
https://support.vonage.com/app/answe...d/690/kw/ports

I am happy to say that my service is working now, after a lot of experimentation and help from tech support (they are great). But read on.

Voipo still claims all ports 5004-65000 are needed. What I found works best for me is to put the HT502 on the DMZ port of my router. That enables you to turn back on the advanced firewall features, and you do not need to forward any ports anymore to the HT502. Voipo also said that they "moved" my HT502 to a different server, whatever that means exactly. I also turned off UPNP and am not using any ports in the range 5004-65000 currently. What I don't know is what will happen if some of my other devices will be using any port in the 5004-65000 range. I am planning on turning UPNP back on in a few days, see what happens once I get holes poked into that range of ports.

I’m curious to know what router you have—because I have an extremely restrictive symmetric NAT firewall (running OpenBSD) at home and VOIPo has been “plug and play” for me since day one. Zero ports have been forwarded. It Just Worked. No magical DMZ. That said though—yes, I concur—asking ports 5004-65000 to be forwarded to anything is beyond irrational.

Let me explain something about ports. There are 65535 ports. However; that's for EACH IP address. Where conflicts arise is in the inbound, whereby you are trying to port forward. If you have a lot of devices that you are trying to work on your network; such as a server, camera, and other things, the easiest and best way to solve all your problems is to buy multiple static IP addresses. Then, ports don't matter. If each device has a different IP address, they can all use the same ports. But in the "Poor Man's" world of the internet, we use NAT. We take 1 IP address, a router, and try and get a lot of things working on it.

The other thing is; VoipO doesn't use all the ports between 5004-65000. But their ports are dynamic, so you don't quite which ports are going to be used for the voice packets until it happens. Personally, where most problems come from with Voip and Ports, are people who insist on using the Firewall features of their router; and Static Packet Inspection. (SPI). I recommend leaving them totally OFF. If you are really insistent on using them instead of individual software solutions, simply use 2 separate routers. I.e. Have 1 typical router with built in 4 port switch. Hook that to your internet modem. One LAN port connect to your VOIP adapter. The 2nd port, connect to a 2nd router. In that router, you can do all the firewalling, SPI, Port Forwarding, etc... that you want. On the first router, forward a Port RANGE of 5004-65000 to the voip adapter. Ports 1-5003 and 65001-65535 forward to the 2nd Ip address that's feeding the 2nd router. Then, in the 2nd router, port forward the individual ports to the devices you have using it.

I personally prefer to protect my individual devices instead of having one router try and protect the entire network. But I have used multiple routers before. If you know how to route properly, you can definitely do it. Think about all the routers you have to go through in order to get to a server on the internet. Probably no less than 4-5. Anyway; just a suggestion.

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Originally Posted by christcorp

If you are really insistent on using them instead of individual software solutions, simply use 2 separate routers. I.e. Have 1 typical router with built in 4 port switch. Hook that to your internet modem. One LAN port connect to your VOIP adapter. The 2nd port, connect to a 2nd router. In that router, you can do all the firewalling, SPI, Port Forwarding, etc... that you want. On the first router, forward a Port RANGE of 5004-65000 to the voip adapter. Ports 1-5003 and 65001-65535 forward to the 2nd Ip address that's feeding the 2nd router. Then, in the 2nd router, port forward the individual ports to the devices you have using it.

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While I concur with you with regard to the sad state of affairs with consumer-class Internet, single IP addresses and NAT—hopefully IPv6 addresses this—and while VOIPo’s issues might be addressed by taking a draconian approach with port forwarding, to assume your single service/application is entitled to 90 percent of someone’s available ports is unreasonable. As for using multiple routers, IMHO, this is overly complex and should not be required to simply have voice service.

It seems like voipo should be able to narrow the range of RTP ports on a per user basis.

Or even better, configure the switch (FreeSwitch I believe) to assign a very specific set of RTP ports for each user/account.

This would require a bit more initial setup on accounts, but in the long run I would expect it to pay off.

To Bink: I have a netgear WNDR3700 router.

To Christcorp: While what you suggest will work, that kind of install makes Voipo instantly a niche service. If it is not "plug and play" it won't be widely adopted. BTW I did try something like what you said with the HT502 in front of my router. But that made my incoming connections no longer work, plus the HT502 has a throughput limit of about 20 Mbps and my internet connection is (a lot) faster than that. Thus I was losing bandwidth. Your comment about ports is interesting. If I understand you right, now that the ATA is on the DMZ port, I can now use the same ports the ATA might use, correct?

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Originally Posted by barthold

To Bink: I have a netgear WNDR3700 router.

To Christcorp: While what you suggest will work, that kind of install makes Voipo instantly a niche service. If it is not "plug and play" it won't be widely adopted. BTW I did try something like what you said with the HT502 in front of my router. But that made my incoming connections no longer work, plus the HT502 has a throughput limit of about 20 Mbps and my internet connection is (a lot) faster than that. Thus I was losing bandwidth. Your comment about ports is interesting. If I understand you right, now that the ATA is on the DMZ port, I can now use the same ports the ATA might use, correct?

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I looked through the HT502 user manual and I didn't see anything about the throughput maximum being 20 Mbs. Is that figure based on your experience?

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Originally Posted by Tooth

I looked through the HT502 user manual and I didn't see anything about the throughput maximum being 20 Mbs. Is that figure based on your experience?

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While I haven’t formally tested it, one of my devices downloaded at 11Mbps through it (my Internet connection is 20Mbps). If this is the upper limit of the device (don’t know if this is an artificial ceiling configured by VOIPo), then it is substandard for many Internet connections. Thankfully, only one of my systems communicates through this device—if my whole network had to, this would be unacceptable. That said, assuming the limit is not artificial, I understand this device supports a bridging mode—no NATting—and I wonder if this mode would allow for better performance. As it stands, it appears the VOIPo recommended physical configuration of the device would negatively affect my Internet speeds. Fortunately, I do not use this device in the recommended physical configuration and my VoIP works well.