Vonage over BTL's network not working or working badly. Vonage over Direcway, about a good as expected.
2 other Voip services over BTL are working fine. BTL tech swears they are not blocking Voip. Claims if they were blocking, it would not work sporadically, rather it would not work at all. Perhaps this is a Vonage problem.
Which other ones are working? I know Skype is working at the moment, but if you look around the Belize boards for the last several months, you will see the Skype users and users of basically every other Voip app (ATA or PC based) are having issues.
Indeed folks at BTL are saying they are not "blocking". Maybe this is true. It's kinda like Karl Rove saying that he didn't commit a crime because he didn't "knowlingly" blow the cover of a CIA agent. Well, I guess it's sort of like that.
The questions to BTL should be "Are you blocking, filtering or otherwise disrupting voice over IP traffic in any way for any service?" If the answer is continually "no", then since this is a ISP-wide (country-wide) issue, I would presume it is some other mis-configuration ineptness on their part that is causing the issues.
Let me be clear - I think BTL is a good company. I have friends at the local level and contacts in the city. They are knowlegdable and professional. Rumor has it they are coming out with their own Voip offering and I will sincerely consider it. At the moment, I still think this is something on the BTL IP network that is causing this.
As for satellite, I am not there yet... maybe someday.
Here are some more tcpdumps, these are from the PAP2 ATA boot sequence. Note the "unreachable" messages, not sure if this is part of the problem, but someone here might...
Command
sudo tcpdump -i {ext_interface} host 192.168.2XX.XX and not port syslog
(vonage has had the PAP2 in debug mode so I stripped out the syslog packets)
1. BTL may not be blocking but they may have found a way to lower the quality of service.
2. The problem appears to be intermittent - sometimes you have a dial tone, sometimes not. Sometimes, if your number answers, you can talk for 10 minutes or just a few minutes before the call completely drops.
3. DSL lines in Belize are shared (burstable). A loaded circuit can degrade service.
4. I have not been able to confirm that any other Voip service is having a problem other than Vonage. I have confirmed that Skype is working without a problem.
5. While running the Voip Test - www.testyourvoip.com - can provide a lot of data, is there someone capable of reading the data to determine what is happening?
6. PUC has announced a meeting to "a few" indicating that on April 26, a public meeting will be held by PUC between 9:00 - 12:00 to discuss "Opportunities and Threats for Voip in Belize?" Suggest you confirm this with PUC and get as many people there as possible who have done their homework about Voip, any ITT regulations and history in other countries.
7. The real test might be to find a VSAT user who is using Vonage and who has a higher bandwidth than the standard Direcway or Starband system. Regardless of the latency, if Vonage is working with a VSAT, the problem is not Vonage but more likely, the provided DSL system.
8. Rumors are substantial. *BTL has been slowing down Voip for a month and are moving to do away with it altogether. *BTL is attempting to shut down Voip completely. *BTL is attempting to stop all VSAT's (Direcway, Starband and others). *BTL wants to stop "instant messaging". Before posting, get confirmation.
9. With all the reported or apparent calls to Vonage Customer Service, why have they not be able to determine the problem and report it - regardless of its cause?
One last thought to remember. BTL will fight to the end. The purpose of their business is to make as large a profit as possible - just like any public corporation in the world. And, their long distance services are the largest profit center that they have.
Have been having the same problem with making calls via Vonage from Belize. BTL has applied to PUC to block Voip & IM and also to make vsat illegal (again). As they have in the past the strategy appears to be to go ahead with their plans and simultaneously ask PUC for permission. Other citizens/residents will remember tarrif rate hikes. There is a PUC public forum at the Fort George 26th April 0900 at the Caracol room to discuss these issues.
On their methodology, I assumed at first that simple filtering of ports in BTL routers was the cause. Experimentation by others would appear to suggest that something a little more intelligent is happening. Possibly stateful inspection and blocking by content or TOS (type of service bit). If this is so then it is unlikely that a work around can be found. Good work by KnckrBckr in getting to a higher level of tech support at Vonage. I kept on ending up with the first level guy with an indian accent wanting me to reboot the ATA
According to Coral Cable themselves their customers are affected in exactly the same way and to the same extent as BTL customers. Seems the only way out is to transfer to satellite, but that (apparently) doesn't support Voip very well at best.
Does anyone know the true legal position - can BTL legally do what they are doing? The next question is whather they can be made to care. The only answer is government regulation effectively carried out, but I don't see that ever happening in Belize in any field.
Over the past few days, I've enjoyed a crash course in Vonage technology, specifically the basics of SIP. Vonage has actually been pretty good. The NJ folks in top level customer support are savvy and willing to help.
I credit OpenBSD and more broadly, my UNIX-based firewall and it's tools or a lot of this new knowledge. If you are interested, check out tcpdump and ngrep and even old favorites like ssh, ping, traceroute and telnet.
I am not quite done with discovery, but it is clear at this point that BTL is using a Voip firewall. Otherwise known as ALG (application layer gateway), this software "function" has many commerical names. Beyond looking at TCP/UDP ports (Layer 4), this software is looking at the Voip payload itself (Layer 5/6/7), specifically at the SIP packets. Most of these Voip security companies serve enterprises with legitimate security mechanisms, but a few of them are marketing "mediation" product to ISPs which is basically a "VoIP-be-gone" pill for your network.
Most large ISPs in the USA and Europe push far too much capacity for any reasonable Layer 4+ filtering. This type of inspection performed on billions of packets per second is costly and introduces performance challenges. Most ISPs don't operate with the protection of a government sponsored monopoly either.
I am 95% certain I know what is going on, but I need one more day to nail down the specifics. At this point, it looks like they might be re-writing the SIP packets, picking out the good stuff of the packet and putting bad stuff back in like BUSY and CANCEL. Forgive my generalizing here and forgive me if I have it totally wrong.
My guess is that BTL has installed a whiz bang Voip firewall which they have on a trial basis. They are checking it out and seeing if they want to pay Joe Shmoe slick-USA software company for a license. My advice to BTL - channel that money into something else. Something else like - better services and better support.
Each section starting with a # represents a unique SIP message. The following is a outbound call I initiated to another US number.
The first message is the INVITE message. You will see time/date stamp, IP origin and destination and the next line (depending on your browser formatting is the start of the "message". In this case we see "INVITE". This is my ATA asking the Vonage proxy to complete this SIP handshake with my outside callee.
About 2 seconds later, I receive this next message and this is the reason for the Fast "Busy". You can see the "486 Busy". Two interesting things to note here. First, Vonage didn't send me this message and secondly I received this message about 9ms (9 thousanths of a second) before the following "good" one arrives.
# U 2006/03/28 13:34:02.101038 69.59.252.35:10xxx -> 200.xx.xxx.xxx:65xxx SIP/2.0 486 Busy. Call-ID: 6a0XXaa9-928XXfac@192.168.xxx.xx. From: 212-xxx-xxxx <sip:1212xxxxxxx@d.voncp.com:10xxx>;tag=xxxc7685ae119580o1. To: <sip:136xxxxxxxx@d.voncp.com:10xxx>. Via: SIP/2.0/UDP 192.168.xxx.xx:10xxx;branch=z9hxxbK-85xx788. User-Agent: 000F66FDBXXX Linksys/PAP2-3.1.9(LSc). CSeq: 101 INVITE. Content-Length: 0. Max-Forwards: 70. . And 9ms later I get the message I was supposed to get (407 proxy auth required). This means they are buffering and/or duplicating the Vonage packets as they get back to me and replacing the good SIP message with "Busy" before this packet can get to me. Thusly, not blocking just confusing or as the clever software companies put it -- "mediating".
# U 2006/03/28 13:34:02.120358 69.59.252.35:10xxx -> 200.xx.xxx.xxx:65xxx SIP/2.0 407 Proxy Authentication Required. Via: SIP/2.0/UDP 192.168.xxx.xx:10xxx;branch=z9hxxbK-85xx788. From: 212-xxx-xxxx <sip:1212xxxxxxx@d.voncp.com:10xxx>;tag=xxxc7685ae119580o1;natted=200.xx.xxx.xxx. To: <sip:136xxxxxxxx@d.voncp.com:10xxx>. Call-ID: 6a0f6aa9-928c8fac@192.168.xxx.xx. CSeq: 101 INVITE. Proxy-Authenticate: Digest realm="69.59.252.35", domain="sip:69.59.252.35", nonce="747xx7601", algorithm=MD5. Max-Forwards: 15. Content-Length: 0. . At this point, my ATA already thinks the call is over and never sends an authentication packet. Even if it did try, the next message kills everything all together with "Request Cancelled". Notice, this came 5ms later (5 thousandths of a second). I say this because the latency between me and the proxy is over 130ms. You can see from the first message how long it took for Vonage (and the Voip pirate) and get back to me after I send the initial INVITE.
My ACK (acknowledge) message goes out 2ms later and sends a few more over the next 5 ms. Not sure what is happening here, but the damage has been done and I assume this is just my ATA saying "ok, I understand the call is over."
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