Calls sometimes get dropped after 5-10 seconds

Posts: 831 · Vonage Forum Evangelist Joined: Jun 08, 2007 Posts: 831

Try doing a multiple ping to vonage.net or 216.115.22.200.

You may be having a problem with the the route that your ISP is using to connect to Vonage.

Posts: 8

OK, I pinged Vonage at 2:10pm EDT and here are the results:

[font=Courier New]Ping statistics for 216.115.22.200:
Packets: Sent = 70, Received = 70, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 43ms, Maximum = 74ms, Average = 48ms[/font]

[font=Arial]No problems that I can see there.
I also did a tracert to vonage.net:[/font]

[font=Courier New]C:\WINDOWS>tracert vonage.net

Tracing route to vonage.net [216.115.22.200]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.0.1
2 9 ms 15 ms 32 ms 64.203.200.1.dyn-cm-pool-69.pool.hargray.net [64.203.200.1]
3 10 ms 28 ms 20 ms ptvl.r97.fe-022.hargray.net [64.203.253.9]
4 28 ms 18 ms 19 ms ge-6-5.car1.Charlotte1.Level3.net [4.71.124.33]
5 27 ms 36 ms 21 ms ae-4-4.ebr1.Atlanta2.Level3.net [4.69.132.162]
6 43 ms 36 ms 34 ms ae-73-70.ebr3.Atlanta2.Level3.net [4.69.138.20]
7 61 ms 36 ms 36 ms ae-2.ebr1.Washington1.Level3.net [4.69.132.86]
8 41 ms 39 ms 50 ms ae-61-61.csw1.Washington1.Level3.net [4.69.134.130]
9 48 ms 38 ms 37 ms ae-1-69.edge1.Washington3.Level3.net [4.68.17.11]
10 48 ms 38 ms 43 ms VONAGE-HOLD.edge1.Washington3.Level3.net [4.79.20.2]
11 40 ms 60 ms 60 ms 0.ae0.br02.kiad0.m.vonagenetworks.net [69.59.229.230]
12 47 ms 74 ms 48 ms 69.59.230.6
13 47 ms 44 ms 44 ms 10.50.1.18
14 43 ms 45 ms 53 ms so-2-1-0.br02.klga1.m.vonagenetworks.net [69.59.251.33]
15 53 ms 47 ms 45 ms ae0.0.br01.klga1.m.vonagenetworks.net [69.59.250.125]
16 * * * Request timed out.
17 57 ms 45 ms 60 ms 216.115.22.200

Trace complete.[/font]

This also looks fine from my end. Who knows what it may look like tomorrow ...

David

Posts: 831 · Vonage Forum Evangelist Joined: Jun 08, 2007 Posts: 831

Looks pretty normal as compared to when I do a traceroute, with the exeption of hargray.net (level3 three does most of the route as is my case).

If this continues, I would contact Vonage and see if they can troubleshoot this.

Posts: 350 · Vonage Forum Evangelist Joined: Dec 04, 2005 Posts: 350

Newish D-Link routers (and I believe the DI-624 is one of them) contain a "feature" called Application Later Gateway. What it does is re-write the packets going through the router so that they contain the public IP address of your internet connection instead of the private IP address of the device behind the router. Now that sounds like it should be a good thing...but in most cases its not. D-Link's Application Layer Gateway also tends to "eat" some packets randomly. Specificlly why, I've never been able to figure out.

Now for your problem... the SIP protocol (which Voip uses for call setup) requires an acknoledgement packet sent to the other end when you answer a call. If that acknoledgement is not received, the other end thinks you're not there and ends the call, within about 5-10 seconds. Your description of the problem, along with the setup of your hardware, points to this as happening.

Here's another problem. D-Link doesn't document that this feature is in many of their routers and alot of them that have it, cannot turn it off. Port Forwarding and DMZ doesn't do anything to counteract this either, so don't waste your time trying it. If you cannot turn off Application Layer Gateway, you'll need to put your Vonage device ahead of your D-Link router so that its connected like so:

Cable Modem -> RTP300 -> D-Link router / whatever

Posts: 831 · Vonage Forum Evangelist Joined: Jun 08, 2007 Posts: 831

Interesting trekologer, According to a post at VOIP-info.org (could be dated information) :

"Many of today's commercial routers implement SIP ALG (Application-level gateway), coming with this feature enabled by default. While ALG could help in solving NAT related problems in client LAN side, the fact is that many routers ALG implementation has wrong behaviour and breaks SIP protocol making, more or less, impossible the communication."