Changes for VoIP by provider.

e have a line from ViaTalk that we are currently using in one of our remote offices. I have been getting hammered with issues of late on the performance of the line so I called them today to give them grief.

What I got was that they had us routed through a server in Houston, TX. This office is in Ohio. So they re-routed the traffic through a Chicago, IL server now.

But they also recommended Port Forwarding. Anyone have experience with this? I currently have a cable from our cable modem to the wan port on our Cisco 871 and the IP phone is plugged into one of the switch ports on the router.

The performance issues are broken voice, both short and long. Dropped calls, etc. We only have currently 4 PCs and one server in this location so its not a bandwidth issue from what I can tell its a 5MB/2MB connection (I think without looking).

The Ports they are telling me to Forward are:

2. Please forward the following port ranges:

69-69
1025-65535

The protocol is UDP, and the IP address is the IP of your adapter. This IP address is the IP you heard in step 1.

The forwarding instructions that they gave me are:

www.portforward.com/english/routers/port...00Series/default.htm

Any comments, good, bad, indifferent? TIA.

Tim

If it's not a bandwidth problem then VOIP problems could be caused by latency or jitter (changes in latency while the call is in progress). That in turn could be caused by other unrelated traffic coming and going on other parts of the network (or even outside your network such as contention with other users). It might be worth setting something up to monitor and record the round-trip time and then see if that spikes when you get call disruption.
As to the port forwarding I'm not sure I can see what they're getting at

From what I can tell so far, they just want to forward all the call traffic straight through to the VoIP box which is connected to our phone system.

Ok, need a little guidance. I made some other changes as per our VoIP provider and am getting ready with the port fowarding in case the first steps don't work as expected.

They gave me the following example to use:

ip nat inside source static tcp 192.168.216.6 69 interface FastEthernet4 69

ip nat inside source static tcp 192.168.216.6 1025-65535 interface FastEthernet4 1025-65535

They said to forward:

69-69
1025-65535

So the lines above should do this. I stepped through while logged into the remote router and the one that is a range apparently will be a problem. I didn't see how I could enter a range. It appeared to only want a single port.

I started scanning around and haven't found anything yet, but it is early on Monday....so maybe I am just still asleep from the weekend.

TIA.

Tim