Altigen and Multitech

[E1Designs]

Not sure if this would be the best place to ask this question, so here it goes.

The main issue is that there is an Altigen server in location A, location B has IP phones with which it registers via the server at location A. When a public IP is used for location A's server (static set up in PIX) it registers and apepars to be functioning. What happens though is that you dial the phone and it will show "ringing" int he display of the Altigen although it is not really ringing and I can not hear the ringing. It can not make outbound calls either. I samw somebody mention something about STUN on a search I did, however I am not sure this is the issue? It works flawlessly through the VPN, although some say the delay in voice could be to the VPN overhead and we should move it outside the VPN, thus this entire post.

Thanks Again!!!

 

[senk1s]

try the altigen forum
forum1456

 

[E1Designs]

Looked fairly dead over there, but I shall give it a go

Thank You

 

[nsantin]

What do you think of the Altigen system? We were just about to buy one but opted for the BCM 200 instead. I wasn;t overly impressed with the Altigen phones, but it has an impressive feature set out of the box.

Are you satisfied with the system? As for you issue, can;t speak about the altigen, but it is not recommend practice to connected VOIP phones via public IP with the BCM. VPN is the way to go.

 

[E1Designs]

Well so far the Altigen system has been ok. The difficult part is implementing the systrem with the Multitech box to keep a local presence at the remote offices. The altigen support is somewhat iffy though, that is my main complaint. They seem to "guess" at fixes the majority of the time and I feel like a guinea pig.

The IP600 phones form Altigen are horrid, that is one complaint. Labeling, archaic, just blah if you will. I know they have a step up, but the entry level IP phones should be more intuitive for the user.

 

[E1Designs]

nsantin,

What codec are you running? Any issues with voice quality? No QoS right, since you are via VPN?

 

[nsantin]

I thought the phones were bad too. The vendor we had tried to swap them with polycom IP phones and run 323, but I wasn;t impressed with a patch-work solution. BCM is a solid platform (and 20% more expensive), but it has it's issues too.

We run G711 internally, G729 for the remote users and 2 small remote branch offices.

We do run QOS on the VPN Tunnels, granted there is no QOS on the 'net, but at least you can get the VOIP traffic out and over the tunnel faster and it is prioritized when it hits the internal network. This is very noticeable when a user attempts to talk and access network resources at the same time.

Some VPN equipment does not support this, luckily ours does. We are running a Nortel Contivity VPN appliance at HQ and FortiGate 60s at the Remote Sites. Dial up users use the Nortel Contivity IPSEC client. (Guess we've turned into a nortel shop)

 

[E1Designs]

We have a Cisco 1721 in house along with a PIX 506e, then a PIX 501 at the remote offices. The remote offices have a T1 as we do internally. They are all permanent VPN tunnels. From what I understood though I could not do any form of QoS as the data would be encrypted so the router woujld see it all the same. I guess you are running QoS via your firewall? We are running 723.1 as it seems to provide the best quality and lowest overhead, although I wanted to go with 729...it just seemed to have more issues.

Oh how I love standards