Internet telephones

Pet Nanny said:

Does anyone here have a telephone that is run off their internet? I am at my wit's end, since our business phone is and I just changed providers from Plusnet to Sky. They assured me that there would be no disruption to my business line on the changeover, but last Thursday when I tried to set up the router it was as dead as a dodo. To cut a long story short, the engineer came to our house four days later and said there was nothing wrong. He set up the old box fine but he left me without a working business line.
Sky seem to have little or no knowledge of these type of phones and informed me that the routers were fairly new, hence they couldn't really help! I have spent hours being shunted around from dept to dept, each person giving a different reason for why the phone won't work.
The latest reason was that I had the wrong broadband and my box did not support an internet phone (I am in a non fibre broadband network), and this morning it changed to the box cannot be functioning properly.
The company that provides my internet phone have placed an app on my mobile to enable me to receive my business calls that way until this is resolved. In the meantime, Sky is no closer to resolving this issue and my cooling off period is getting shorter. Could anyone advise, please. I was in tears this morning, trying to get this matter resolved and Sky are not even signed up to the Ombudsman scheme. Neither do they have a complaints department and you cannot speak to a manager!

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Vivid Web Design UK said:

Are you using the ISP provided router?

If you are, this may be your issue - as that router is unlikely to include a port for VOIP.

Whilst a VOIP port looks identical to a normal CAT5 Connector, its the magic that happens inside the router that makes the difference.

You may need to install a network switch between the router and the devices on the network. A good switch will include ports for Data and VOIP.

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John Hemming said:

Home routers tend to have firewalls. Those can block some of the traffic on the internet (such as UDP packets that are used for VOIP). Resolving this sort of thing is quite fiddly.

Home routers can be relatively inflexible in the way in which they handle things.

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Nico Albrecht said:

I see you have zero understanding how VoIP and sip is actually working and invented a new term as well " home router " not sure how you define this but is my cisco router at home now suddenly a ' home router'? In any case I recommend like in many other cases get professional help from a qualified person to set it up if words like subnet turning off a firewall for testing or having a look through router log files seems already to complicated. The only one to blame here is the VoIP provider for not given support to set the VoIP phone up again and the person who posted the thread for not getting professional help.

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Nico Albrecht said:

na, you got it wrong again. Adding a link to a netgear product made it even worse. Some of the Zyxel ones are actually pretty decent for the home users. What you problem mean is " I got a crappy free router from my ISP " and **** doesn't work. Again, the only one that could trouble shoot here is your VOIP provider. They should take you step by step from setting up the phone with a new static ip to troubleshooting blocked ports and how to do that not skype. Since he mentioned that calls are working on his phone via app are working and I presume he uses wifi to make those calls using the same ISP we can safely argue that the app simulating a voip phone on the same network works and is not blocked. e.g go back to your VOIP provider.

Not sure why some would need port forwarding etc.... I recently set up 2 offices for a friend for network and voip phones. Due to budgets in place I had to go with a draytek router and Ubiquiti switches and secure gateway.+ Yealink phones. I actually liked the Ubiquiti stuff for setups.

Apart from adding vlans for the phones and bandwidth control and priority packages for the voip service there was no need for port forwarding, firewall rules, are any other of that nonesen that was rec..

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