No Connection from Blueface, is this common?

ve

I am considering getting a blueface account for a home office. Single line would do, but I plan on using an Asterisk server on my network to handle answer machine, future expansion, etc. Also there doesn't seem to be a business option that would allow me just get a single line with a geo number, is there?. The phone is being used in a home office, but is part of a business, does that mean I have to sign up for a business account with them or will they allow me register a business name as the owner of a residential account (I doubt it).

A friend of miine, also a business owner, recently installed blueface's business €34.99 p/m flat rate plan. At the moment he just has one phone connected to the line and has his local geo number assigned etc. I have called him on it a few times and he has called me, etc. When I call him we both found the call quality very good, however there have been times (approx 30% of the time) when I will call him and I will not hear anything ringing. His phone on the other end does not ring. I wait a good 30 - 40 seconds before hanging up. Other times when I ring him the phone starts ringing the usual few seconds after I press dial on my phone.

For me that is unacceptable. As a business I wouldn't want people ringing my number and having to redial or wonder why the hell my phone isn't ringing (or wonder is it ringing, because all they hear is silence). I wouldn't mind if that happened maybe 1 call in a 100, but nearly 30-40% of the time when I call his number all I hear is silence. For now he still has the 'ol Eircom line, so I ring that and get through straight away.

I don't know what to do tbh, because I have two of those wifi Netgear Skype phones with a geo number and find them absolutely terrible and a complete waste of time/money. The phones constantly disconnect from my router and don't automatically reconnect. Despite the fact that everytime I enter my skype login details and ask it to remember my login, it still asks me every time to re-enter my details.

I've read on here countless people say they use Blueface for their business. I ask specifically those people, do you have any complaints from people trying to get through. Do you even know if people are getting through to complain? Do you believe whole heartedly that you are not annoying customers or loosing business as a result of employing VOIP technology in your business? If you believe a business can survive solely on a blueface account for telephony, what equipment/configuration are you using?

Many thanks

Nark

ve wrote: »

... I wait a good 30 - 40 seconds before hanging up. Other times when I ring him the phone starts ringing the usual few seconds after I press dial on my phone.

For me that is unacceptable. As a business I wouldn't want people ringing my number and having to redial or wonder why the hell my phone isn't ringing (or wonder is it ringing, because all they hear is silence). I wouldn't mind if that happened maybe 1 call in a 100, but nearly 30-40% of the time when I call his number all I hear is silence. For now he still has the 'ol Eircom line, so I ring that and get through straight away.

I don't know what to do tbh, because I have two of those wifi Netgear Skype phones with a geo number and find them absolutely terrible and a complete waste of time/money. The phones constantly disconnect from my router and don't automatically reconnect. Despite the fact that everytime I enter my skype login details and ask it to remember my login, it still asks me every time to re-enter my details.

I've read on here countless people say they use Blueface for their business. I ask specifically those people, do you have any complaints from people trying to get through. Do you even know if people are getting through to complain? Do you believe whole heartedly that you are not annoying customers or loosing business as a result of employing VOIP technology in your business? If you believe a business can survive solely on a blueface account for telephony, what equipment/configuration are you using?

Many thanks

It sounds like a classic case of the firewall on your friends Internet connection dropping the incoming call invites.

Firewalls usaually have a state table where they keep track of which internal devices are talking to which external devices - so they can shuffle the packets when there are simultaneous communications to the correct IP address and port etc. However there is usually a limit ( probably 60s ) to how long they will remember a state if there is no traffic.

So you have a re-registration period with blueface of 300s. Your device registers, Blueface are happy because they know where to send your calls
etc. But after 60s your firewall removes the state from its table because it thinks those devices have stopped talking. An incoming call comes in - Blueface send the SIP invites to the IP address and port they have in their registration table. But your firewall does not know to forward on the packets because it removed the state table entry. The Blueface side will assume the packets were dropped due to network issues and re-send the invites after timeout intervals. The caller will hear nothing while this is happening and the call will never get connected.

Blueface set up keep-alive packets from their side - but some firewalls are so under-spec they need to even clean this entry out.

What you can do is set your re-registration interval to 120s and enable NAT keep alives on your SIP devices.

If you are giong to run your own * server at home I recommend you get an old laptop and run OpenBSD 4.4 on it. You can buy a second Gb PCMCIA Nic for about 50 euro. Installing OpenBSD is simple and installing * afterward is even simpler:

# cd /usr/ports/telephony/asterisk && make && make install

Then just copy the safe_asterisk startup script to the end of your rc.conf.local file so Asterisk starts on re-boot.

The advantages of having your own laptop as a firewall are

1) It has battery backup built in
2) you can ssh to the box and use tcpdump to see whats really happening over the network ( instead of just guessing ).
3) you don't need to worry about NAT issues for VoIP
4) you can increase firewall parameters udp timeouts etc to suit yourself for QoS etc etc....

I use an old Dell laptop myself but it is still way over spec'd:

load averages: 0.09, 0.09, 0.08 09:29:31
30 processes: 29 idle, 1 on processor
CPU states: 0.1% user, 0.0% nice, 0.2% system, 0.7% interrupt, 99.0% idle
Memory: Real: 24M/160M act/tot Free: 832M Swap: 0K/1028M used/tot

PID USERNAME PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE WAIT TIME CPU COMMAND
21145 _asteris 2 0 8548K 12M sleep poll 3:12 0.00% asterisk
1842 root 10 0 3184K 2956K sleep nanosle 0:16 0.00% perl
14277 _ospf6d 2 0 1432K 1908K idle poll 0:09 0.00% dnscache

If you need help feel free to PM me.

Good luck.

Nark