(Sorry this is so long.....)

I'm having an intermittent outbound problem that's existed since the Voipo TA was installed a couple of weeks ago.

Intermittently, I get a fast busy after dialing a number. I haven't discerned any pattern to the dialed number. It could happen on any particular call attempt.

I've done the following:

1. I had 4 other TA's, plus an asterisk box with 2 SIP and 1 IAX trunks on the network. Things were really confusing, so I unplugged the asterisk server, and all but one of the TA's - a NEXTAlarm PAP2T, using Port 5065. This thing is dead reliable, and for obvious reasons, I can't get rid of this TA. No obvious change to the symptom.

2. I started with a Linksys RVL-200 router. This is a half-way decent VPN router, but I've noticed that it can REALLY be flaky when it wants to (No pattern to it either!). I tried forwarding ports 5060-5062 and 35000-65000 and inputting appropriate firewall rules (boy - I DO NOT like opening so many ports!). Sometimes, the ports don't open when you tell them to, sometimes they do. And the router log is next to useless. I saw no difference in symptom.

3. Because I don't trust the router, even though I like it's VPN capabilities, I dug through the junk box and found a D-Link DI-604, that's pretty basic, but at least it's stable. I tried it initially without forwarding ports or firewall changes, with not much change in the symptom. I then turned on the so-called "Gaming Mode", which, as I understand it turns off SPI. I noticed in the router log that it was blocking ports 5061 and 5062 from what appeared to be a Voipo-used server. So I forwarded 5060-5062 to the static IP address of the TA, and opened the ports in the firewall. Unfortunately, this router doesn't allow ranges of ports to be forwarded, and I wasn't about to individually forward 25000 ports so they aren't forwarded. Maybe a slight improvement in failure rate.

By the way, both routers have been updated with the latest available firmware.

4. In another thread I noticed how to get access to server preferences (https://secure.voipo.com/preferences/network). I don't have that selection available to me on my preferences, but the direct link gets me there. I was originally homed to the eastern server. Since Speedtest.net invariably gives me better latency and drastically better download speed (5.5mb/s versus 3.5) on tests to Texas servers versus D.C. servers, I changed my preference to the Midwest server. This has seemed to help somewhat, although the problem is so random that it's hard to quantize it.

5. I tried enabling Voipo STUN. Bad move. It caused the outbound call to go bonkers about 5 seconds into the call, and drop registration on both ports. The ONLY way I could recover was to turn off STUN and point the TA to a different Voipo server. Simply power-cycling it wouldn't bring it back to life. This was repeatable - I could kill it at will. I now have it back pointing to the Midwest server with no STUN.

So that's where I stand. The problem happens now maybe 2 to 3 times a day, versus maybe 4 or 5 before the changes. It doesn't sound like a high occurrence rate, unless you're married to someone who's used to AT&T CallVantage's "it just works". I frequently hear "I want it to work like our old service", and I'm afraid I have to agree with her.

Anyone see anything I've overlooked, or can make any suggestions?

Gary