Service Down ?

[VOIPoTim]

Tim are you saying that the in the vast majority of the cases of the "number disconected or not in service", the issues are port forwarding? If yes, I'm very curious as to why the system doesn't either use the fallback number or voicemail instead of generating "number disconected or not in service".

Failover works when you're not connected to our servers or we can't make any kind of connection. If we make the first connection but then the router blocks another part of the transaction, it fails but failover does not come on since it initially connected to you. There is no real way to modify that.

These sound like the issues I was having starting on 3/19. Unfortunately, support at the time continued to insist that I needed to forward nearly every port on my router to the Voipo ATA (from 5000 to 65000) for both TCP and UDP. Not that I would want to do anything else with my internet service.....

Finally I just gave up on the ticket, and things started to work again by themselves.

The majority of disconnect issues we see are related to routers blocking the ports which is resolved by port forwarding.

What happens a lot is that the initial connection is made to the router and then when we send the 2nd part from another IP somewhere (such as the audio), the router considers that traffic to be "unknown" and blocks it. This generates an error. So an error gets sent back to the phone carrier you are calling FROM and they play the generic error message which is disconnected.

In some cases, it's also just been latency in connections. As an example if we send a request to a customer and it takes too long to hear back and for us to relay back to the carrier you're calling from, it will trigger a failed error which causes them to play disconnected. This is why support commonly checks the ping time and connection between a customer and our network.

So far we've only seen a handful of calls that have failed due to a slow database query recently, but wanted to do these updates as a precautionary measure so that it wouldn't happen at all. So if you've seen it multiple times, that wouldn't be related. We definitely were not at a point where there was a ton of strain on the system and had to immediately upgrade...it was just a situation where we apparently had hit it a few times at peak capacity and wanted to stop it before it became an issue since hardware upgrades as easy to do.

The other thing to keep in mind is that all of these things apply upstream as well. The internet is used for the connection between US and our carriers and between the customer and us. So if there is an issue in either layer that causes something to be too slow or fail, that's another possibility.

That's why it's always important to contact support so they can look at all the scenarios and see why you had issues. We typically do use port forwarding because it is the most efficient way to address the issue and make sure the traffic gets through the router.