Odd problem with VoIP phone

[pmosher441]

I'm using the latest non-beta Merlin FW on my RT-AC68U, with both Adaptive QoS and AiProtection activated. Everything seems fine for all devices (mix of PCs, Chromecast, smart Blu-Ray player, various phones, etc.) and coverage throughout our fairly large house is great. The Asus connects via PPPoE through a Bell Sagemcom modem/router in a passthrough mode.

However, there is one oddball problem with our Gigaset C610A-IP phone system, which is on a wired connection to the router. Twice now in the past couple of days I've noticed that all SIP registrations set up in the Gigaset base station are offline, showing "registration failed" as the only error message. Surprisingly, rebooting the phone and/or power cycling it do not seem to trigger successful registration, hence no phone service. The only thing that worked to bring back the phones was rebooting the Asus router.

For now, I've bypassed the Asus router for the phone system by plugging the Gigaset base station directly into the Sagemcom router. As soon as this connection is made, the phones immediately register successfully and stay that way. Although this works, it of course also bypasses the QoS system in the Asus router, which I wanted to use to give priority to VoIP traffic.

Any thought on the strange symptoms of the Gigaset base station -- dropping all SIP registrations and not reconnecting until the router is rebooted?

Thanks -- Pauline

 

[pmosher441]

Spoke too fast -- I noticed after the above post that the Bell modem had received a new FW version sometime in the past couple of days, which is the subject of a lot of complaining over in the Bell Canada forum of DSL Reports: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r29890908-Bell-Fibe-25-10-ASUS-RT-N66U-to-Sagemcome-2864-issues. Unfortunately I now have that buggy FW, and it probably coincides with the phone problems. Perhaps the Asus is losing connectivity briefly and the phone don't reregister automatically.

Any other thoughts would be appreciated, but I'm now thinking it's nothing to do with the Asus..

 

[Mistermoonlight]

I am using 2 voip devices with rt-n66 and did not enable qos at all for the moment, cause i never got any issue with the phones so far...

 

[tijaune]

Previously when I was using pppoe over Bell line, stability was an intermittent issue with at least 2 incidents per month ... waking up in the morning and have to reboot adsl modem.

I switched to cable for 2 months already, use Automatic IP in WAN and had none "morning" incident. I'll say pppoe bring it share of problem to the router depends on the quality of your phone line.

I'm also switching to voip since and even with no qos activate never had voip problem.

I have WAN -> NAT Passthrough -> SIP Passthrough = Enabled.

 

[Nullity]

If you have known types of traffic needing prioritization/deprioritization, I would use standard QoS.

I have no idea how the Adaptive QoS "adapts", so it could cause unforeseen problems when it tries to dynamically adapt to different types of traffic congestion.

 

[pmosher441]

For the moment, I'm just going to leave my VoIP phone connected directly to the Bell router/modem, not to the Asus. It works this way, although of course it can't take advantage of any QoS in the Asus. The Asus router is connecting by PPPoE passthrough and gets an external IP address, but for some reason the Gigaset phone is unstable when wired to the Asus.

It's a little annoying when you have to settle for a work-around like this instead of a solution that you actually understand, but not a big deal. Until I have problems with this setup, I'll leave it be.

Thanks for comments in this thread.

 

[fafot]

I had the same problem with the latest (as of June 14, 2015) Marlin 378.54_2 on AC87U. Found the solution here: http://whrl.pl/RdPZwh

"OK, I found what was wrong! I went to the menu entry WAN>NAT Passthrough and in this list there is amongst others an entry for SIP Passthrough which is enabled by default. I just disabled it and Bob was my ...........!"

 

[pmosher441]

This sounds like a very similar problem to the one in my OP above. However, my long term solution is a little different. It turns out that Bell (my ISP) finally issued a firmware fix to their modem/router (a Sagemcom) after many, many complaints from subscribers like me. This new FW completely fixed all the various disconnects that people were experiencing, including mine, and consequently the Gigaset no longer loses its registration. I have reconnected the Gigaset to the Asus router (which is in PPPoE passthrough mode), and everything's been fine for months.

I've decided not to bother with QoS -- I simply don't think it's needed with our particular usage patterns, but I've left "SIP Passthrough" on its default enabled state.