Four blinks, no dial tone until reboot, EVERY DAY!

Posts: 13 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Feb 28, 2004 Posts: 13

I have had Vonage since the last week in February. At first, I used it with DSL (1536down/512up) from my local phone company, but I experienced dropouts when I was uploading or downloading, so I switched to Road Runner cable service (3000down/300up). With the Road Runner, no matter how much I download or upload I haven't been able to get it to "drop out," and I have the bandwidth setting at the "highest" quality.

BUT

At some point every day, I lose service. The power light on the VT1000 changes from steady to four blinks and stays that way. For hours. Until I reboot the cable modem and voice terminal. (Takes about 2 minutes to reboot the cable modem, and a further five to six minutes to reboot the VT1000, so 7 to 8 minutes of my home network being unplugged before I can make or take calls).

Any incoming calls during this time sometimes go to voice mail, sometimes forward to my network availability number.

I have been in contact with Vonage tech support and they have been very active trying to resolve the issue (firmware updates; configuration file changes; even enabling a 'debug mode' on the voice terminal to see what's going on) but no solution up to this point.

Anyone have ideas why this might be happening?

My configuration:

Motorola CABLE MODEM -> Motorola VT1000 VOICE TERMINAL -> TrendNet CABLE/DSL ROUTER -> The PCs on my home network

All help appreciated. Imagine having to kill all your computers and stare at blinking lights for seven or eight minutes every time you wanted to be able to make or take phone calls.

Peace,

Joe

---
Jesus Saves.

Posts: 37 · Vonage Forum Junior Joined: Feb 12, 2004 Posts: 37

Try putting your Motorola device behind your router. It may or may not fix the problem, but the process of rebooting will become much less painful. None of your computers will depend on your Motorola device for their internet connection.

Many people have posted that the Motorola ATA is more stable behind a firewall.

Posts: 433 · Posted: Sat Mar 13, 2004 8:30 pm Post subject:

Check your cable connection. I had a similar problem on a daily manner, and found that the cable line was the cause.

Just a thought.

Posts: 16 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Mar 06, 2004 Posts: 16

I was having the same problem every 4-5 days until I called Tech Support and they pushed new firmware to my Motorola ATA. They said I was two revisions back and that the latest revision addressed the no dialtone issue. Since then, I have not had a problem. I have my ATA in front of my router so I'm getting QoS on my calls. I can upload/download with heavy volumes of data and no impact on call quality.

Posts: 243 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: Jan 18, 2004 Posts: 243

This is a known problem that Vonage was hoping would be fixed with the latest firmware update. The NAT tables are crashing and what they are doing is gathering information for the engineers to look at.

What everyone needs to do who is having this problem is to call tech support and request that their adapter be put into debug mode. When the adapter goes down(don't reboot the adapter until your told to do so) call tech support from another phone/cell phone and tell them what time the adapter went offline. They will check the logs and ask you a few questions. They will extract the log info and send it to the engineers. They might even move you to another server which they did in my case. I've been put on a server that doesn't seem to have this problem or is not reported as frequently.

A side note- as I was on the phone with Tech support I could hear other techs saying the same thing about this being a known problem and that they are looking into it.

Hang in there everyone....

Greg

Posts: 13 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Feb 28, 2004 Posts: 13

I decided to quit "hanging in there" and on LA's suggestion put the voice terminal behind my router. Now I have ...

Cable modem -> TRENDNet TEW311BRP Router -> PCs and voice terminal

I did this so that I could reboot just the voice terminal instead of the whole Internet connection.

But, that plan didn't work out -- because it hasn't given me the tinyest problem since.

Tier II tech support called me shortly after I moved things around to ask whether I had made any configuration changes (apparently they were watching the debug log!) and I told them what I had done. They had me map some ports even though it was working already (they said that it's better to map the ports because sometimes the device will stop responding if the ports aren't mapped) and that was that.

So, on the one hand I am not helping them to figure out the problem anymore -- but on the other hand my service is back to normal.

Thanks to everyone who has helped or contributed suggestions.

Peace.

- Joe

---
Jesus Saves.

Posts: 18 · Posted: Mon Mar 15, 2004 4:56 pm Post subject:

gfoulks wrote:

This is a known problem that Vonage was hoping would be fixed with the latest firmware update. The NAT tables are crashing and what they are doing is gathering information for the engineers to look at.

What everyone needs to do who is having this problem is to call tech support and request that their adapter be put into debug mode. When the adapter goes down(don't reboot the adapter until your told to do so) call tech support from another phone/cell phone and tell them what time the adapter went offline. They will check the logs and ask you a few questions. They will extract the log info and send it to the engineers. They might even move you to another server which they did in my case.
...Hang in there everyone.... Greg

I don't have that kind of time to devote to phone service. My wife can not live with these daily outages. Now I am trying to switch my number to IDT & FOCAL (the telcom that Vonage subcontracts) is giving them a hassle.

Posts: 15 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Feb 25, 2004 Posts: 15

I had the same problem, but only when my Netgear WGT614 router was used, when I moved to a Linksys router things went back to normal (I've been working reliably for over a week now).

I'm convinced the MTA is part of the problem, but the Netgear was absolutely part of it.

Even the new firmware didn't solve my problem and I was coming close to the point of cancelling my service.

Vonage often advices putting the MTA between the modem and the router, that is IMHO still too unreliable to do, my entire network would go down several times a day, and as I need remote access to it I couldn't afford those problems.

Posts: 15 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Feb 25, 2004 Posts: 15

I had the same problem, but only when my Netgear WGT614 router was used, when I moved to a Linksys router things went back to normal (I've been working reliably for over a week now).

I'm convinced the MTA is part of the problem, but the Netgear was absolutely part of it.

Even the new firmware didn't solve my problem and I was coming close to the point of cancelling my service.

Vonage often advices putting the MTA between the modem and the router, that is IMHO still too unreliable to do, my entire network would go down several times a day, and as I need remote access to it I couldn't afford those problems.

Posts: 5 · New Forum Member Joined: Mar 17, 2004 Posts: 5

When I started my service I had the same problem. I have been working fine with no reboots for the last 5 weeks or so. The catch is that I have my MTA behind my modem and I got rid of my router. I am now just running firewall software on each of my PCs and have a switch between the MTA and all my PCs