We were having lots of issues with our VOIP service at my Job, the phones would become inactive/dropped calls/horrible voice quality…. after months of trying to troubleshoot the problem and going through 3 routers, getting FIOS and Cable we were ready to leave the service when their IT finally came through with a solution:
If the lights on your phone turn amber occasionally and you cannot make or receive calls at that time, it usually means the phone is losing its connection to our network. There are a few simple settings changes that will help make your phone’s connection more stable. The following instructions will require that you have access to the phone itself and a computer that is on the same network as the phone (generally connected to the same router or switch.) If you have multiple phones that are experiencing this problem, you will need to complete this process on each phone.
1. Obtain your phone’s IP address. This can be found by pressing Menu button on the phone (the button that looks like a piece of paper with a folded top right corner) and then pressing 9.
2. Type the IP address found under “Current IP” directly into your web browser’s address bar on your computer. You do not need http or www.
3. You are now in the Linksys Configuration page. Click on Admin Login in the upper right corner, and then click Advanced in the top right corner.
4. Click on the Ext 1 tab. There are three settings changes you will make here.
5. Under NAT Settings, change NAT Mapping Enable and NAT Keepalive Enable to No.
Typically, your phone sends registration signals to our servers every 30 seconds to let us know that it is still there. NAT Keepalive is a signal that can step on the toes of your phone’s registration requests.
6. Under SIP Settings, change the local SIP Port.
By default, this will be set to 5060, but if your router sees more than one device using port 5060 to communicate with it, it can get overloaded. Therefore, each phone and each extension on your network should have a unique SIP port. The preferred range is from 5060 to 5080, but you may go up to 50000 if necessary.
We recommend avoiding using port 5060 as it is the default port for most SIP devices, as well as other SIP communications such as instant messaging. We also recommend staggering your ports. If you use SiP port 5061 for your first phone/extension, your second phone should use 5062, and so on.
7. Under Proxy and Registration, change the Register Expires period to 30.
Normally, phones will send us registration signals every 30 seconds automatically, but some phones may need specific instructions. This is a way to force the phone to send us registration signals at the appropriate time.
8. At the top of the page, click on the Provisioning tab. The first two settings on the page are Provision Enable and Resync on Reset. Make sure these are set to No. These options will cause your phone to revert to the default settings defined in the provisioning file on our servers upon reset, which means you will lose the changes you made.
9. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on Submit All Changes. Your phone will reset, and when it comes back up it should have a more stable connection to our network.
If you have completed this process and find that the phones still get orange lights intermittently, you may need to do a full network restart. If you are unaware of how to do this, you may contact us for instructions.
I hope this is helpful to you.
