One-Way Audio with 3rd Party VoIP phones on Verizon FiOS

There is an open ticket on this issue... Ticket # {edited for privacy}

I am a technician with a VoIP service provider. Our equipment is plug and play and requires no special considerations in most typical home / small business router configurations.

One of our customers, who is a Verizon FiOS customer in VA, has recently purchased some of our VoIP phones and plugged them in to his network. 100% of his calls, inbound and outbound, are experiencing one-way audio. The customer cannot hear anyone on the line, though the other callers report that they can hear him.

We have logged into the customer's network remotely and verified that our manufacturers configured the phone hardware correctly. Verizon has already replaced his router, even after resetting the previous router to its factory defaults. We are confident that this is not an issue on his local network.

One odd thing that I noticed during testing was that, when doing a tracert to this customer's public IP address, the next-to-last hop consistently shows"No response from host":

|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| WinMTR statistics |
| Host - % | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
| [redacted].accessline.com - 0 | 11 | 11 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 2 |
| [redacted].accessline.com - 0 | 11 | 11 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| [redacted].accessline.com - 0 | 11 | 11 | 0 | 37 | 197 | 1 |
| [redacted].accessline.com - 0 | 11 | 11 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 |
| [redacted].accessline.com - 0 | 11 | 11 | 1 | 6 | 61 | 2 |
| GigabitEthernet4-2.GW6.SEA1.ALTER.NET - 0 | 11 | 11 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 |
| 0.so-1-0-2.XL4.SEA1.ALTER.NET - 0 | 11 | 11 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 1 |
| 0.so-6-1-0.XT2.SEA7.ALTER.NET - 0 | 11 | 11 | 2 | 11 | 80 | 3 |
|0.so-7-2-0.SEA01-BB-RTR2.verizon-gni.net - 0 | 11 | 11 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 3 |
| No response from host - 100 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
|pool-[redacted].rcmdva.fios.verizon.net - 0 | 11 | 11 | 89 | 89 | 91 | 90 |
|________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|
WinMTR v0.92 GPL V2 by Appnor MSP - Fully Managed Hosting & Cloud Provider

Verizon insists that they are not blocking any ports. The ports that our system utilizes are below, just in case:

5060 UDP
6060 UDP
30000 to 38000 UDP
4444 to 4446 TCP

Any insights you may be able to provide are much appreciated!

Thanks,

Kip C.

Accepted answers

coleki

The customer has called back to report that Verizon has made some changes and the issue is resolved.

In the customer's words, here is what they had to do.

Verizon replaced his ONT (Optical Network Terminal), and then they had to update the customer's "Line Profile" to match. Verizon said that this was because their ONT equipment was not compatible with this VoIP phone system.

All comments

lasagna

This sounds like a SIP setup with the ports running on something non-standard. You don't indicate the direction of initiation for the traffic, but I suspect at least some of the sessions are initiated inbound toward the phone to carry the voice channels as dyanmically assigned by the head end.

Try configuring the approriate port triggering in the router under Firewall -> Port Triggering such that the ports you need are mapped when a call is initiated.

To test this theory without programming the router, determine the present IP address of a phone device (are you really individually using phones to access the service or are you using standard phones with an ATA?) and program this device to be in the DMZ (Firewall -> DMZ) and see if it works properly.

coleki

Thanks for your reply!

For this customer's account, they do not have a PBX on site. Each phone gathers a DHCP IP address from the network and individually connects to our servers to gather its configuration information. Outbound phone calls are initiated from the phone hardware itself.

Each phone will have its own IP address, so I'm not sure setting up Port Triggering would work.

lasagna

By definition, the network employs NAT for all devices in the home network toward the internet. If your service can't survive a NAT-traversal, then it will likely not work -- in fact it would likely not work on most any home broadband network nowadays. Without a more specific call setup flow diagram, it's hard to say exactly "how" to make things work.

Port triggering or DMZ mode would at least eliminate other causes as the root of the problem - if a single device can not be made to operate in port triggering or DMZ mode, then the problem lies elsewhere in the setup. If it can, then it's likely a router / firewall setup issue.

coleki

The customer has called back to report that Verizon has made some changes and the issue is resolved.

In the customer's words, here is what they had to do.

prod_man

I am a Verizon Wireless customer and am having the one-way audio issue on all of the phones on my account, including a home phone connect.

After almost exactly 15 minutes on an outgoing call, the receiving party is no longer able to hear the caller and disconnects.

Is there a possibility that these issues are related? So far, Verizon tech support is clueless. The keep stating that it is a signal issue where I live. The only problem with that is it happens no matter where I am, not just my home. I have also tried different handsets, same model replacement and different model replacement, to no avail.

lukeinva1

You need to have your sip provider check thier SIP expiry timer I dont believe that is an option on the fios router.

ElizabethS

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