Avaya J169 Phones freezing at offices with poor network connection

[TigerWoods33]

I am trying to figure out why our Avaya J169SIP Phones freeze (No calls outbound/inbound.. frozen screen etc.) when there is even the slightest amount of jitter on the network. Our H.323 phones seemed to handle it just fine.

When we completed phone system maintenance recently, our H.323 phones rebooted as normal, but all of the J169 phones we deployed got stuck at that same screen.

Is anyone aware of a setting in the 46xxsettings.txt file that can be adjusted to prevent these phones from freezing so easily due to even a minor connection issue?

Let me know!!

(**IPO 11 Feature Pack 4**)

 

[IPGuru]

Avaya J169 Phones freezing at offices with poor network connection

Fix the network issue!


Do things on the cheap & it will cost you dear

 

[sizbut]

Also check you have the latest released firmware (though whatevers included in 11.0 SP4 is pretty recent). The 9600s have years of fixes behind them. The J100s are still new by comparison and so there's new firmware every 3 months as they're brought up to the same level.

Stuck in a never ending cycle of file copying.

 

[TigerWoods33]

@IPGuru
We have remote locations that are almost in farm fields so they will be utilizing very poor network connections. (Example: 6mb dsl for an office of 6 people in the boonies trying to run IP Phones / Computers over our WAN.)

@sizbut
I should have added this in my description, I have already checked on the firmware, and we are on the latest 4.0.0.21 firmware for the J100 series. (It came with IPO 11 FP4.)
I figured Firmware would likely be the fix but alas..

 

[joe2938]

Then maybe you should deploy the h-323 phones instead due to the poor network issues.

 

[TigerWoods33]

@Joe2938
That may have to be our ultimate solution for the offices with poor connection.

However, we are no longer able to buy our standard H.323 phones in 4 packs anymore which saved money, where as we can with the J100 phones. So the business wants to roll with SIP going forwards if we can.

This is why I was hoping to find out if there was a setting that could be tweaked within 46xxsettings.txt that would maybe give a longer period before just freezing up. Very strange really.

 

[TouchToneTommy]

J100's can be switched to H.323 software......

 

[Archangel58]

If memory serves me correctly, I believe that is only for R10.1. The R11.0 only supports the SIP firmware.

 

[TouchToneTommy]

I've converted J169's to H.323 firmware to be able to program VPN. They register as 9611 and work just fine. On 11.0(2)

 

[IPGuru]

@tigerwoods33
Any VoIP solution is dependent on the network quality
if you cannot provide a reliable network connection then VoIP is not going to be a reliable solution & you should perhaps be looking at more suitable alternaties


Do things on the cheap & it will cost you dear

 

[TigerWoods33]

@TouchTone
Would you have to manually set every J100 phone when they boot up to H.323?

@IPGuru
Absolutely, which we are aware of.
But when our H.323 phones can handle the inconsistency of a flakey DSL connection, and our SIP phones could not, that is why I posted to find out what everyone else was doing in said situation.
I don't see a need to look anywhere further than just deploying H.323 phones, or trying to put H.323 firmware onto the J100 phones per TouchTone's suggestion.

 

[TigerWoods33]

Also..

If we remain on SIP it still doesn't explain why the J169 phones freeze when our IP office reboots for lets say maintenance. Our 9608 phones just reboot, our J169 phones froze.

 

[TouchToneTommy]

Switching to H.323 - Get into the Admin menu, scroll all the way down to Signalling, change to H.323, back out of the menus to reboot the phone. It comes back up, contacts the call server, pulls 96x1upgrade.txt and upgraded firmware.

 

[qtelcom]

Thanks for sharing your issue, I wasn't sure if anyone else was having this issue.

We've had a few customers on powered by Avaya with J169's that do the freeze thing also, appears very random & doesn't affect all phones. The phone doesn't display any errors, they simply appear frozen. This was on R11 FP4 with the latest 4.0.1.0 firmware from the support site.

For example, A small site with 8 phones and all new cabling and new switch/router voice vlan and plenty of bandwidth on the WAN, 2 of the 8 phones would randomly lock up maybe once a week, and they would not be the same phones that would lock up, it was random. No SIP ALG's active. Our 9608's don't ever have this issue on a powered by solution. Hope Avaya can get this as reliable as the 9608's.