ATA not registered yet can make calls?

[mh1983]

My HT701 (1.0.8.2 FW) is showing up as not registered today (in both the ATA and freephoneline.ca account views, alike). Yet I can make outgoing calls. I just tried one.

I did a test incoming call and that didn't work -- I got forwarded to voicemail.

Any idea what might be happening there? As the old cliche goes, I haven't changed a thing in a long time and the ATA has been registered problem free for quite awhile now.

[Liptonbrisk]

Registration is not required for outgoing calls. It's required for incoming.

As long as your credentials are fine you can make outgoing calls.
Incoming calls, however, require device registration.

Note that FPL only allows one device registration per account at any time. The most recently registered device will ring. Anything else will not.

. . . .

Thanks to Mango, many of us now understand that in order for ATAs to remain registered and working properly with a VoIP SIP provider like Freephoneline, in particular after power failures, the following conditions must be met:

UDP Unreplied Timeout (in your router) < NAT Keep-alive Interval (in your ATA; for Obihai ATAs this is X_KeepAliveExpires) < UDP Assured Timeout (in your router) < SIP Registration Failure Retry Wait Time (or RegisterRetryInterval in Obihai ATAs)

“<“ means less than.

When a modem leases a new IP address, a problem can arise where prior associations using the old IP address are maintained in the router. When the ATA attempts to communicate using the old IP address, the response is unreplied, and then if the UDP Unreplied timeout is greater than the Keep Alive Interval (and UDP Unreplied timeout is often set to 30 by default in consumer routers) a problem arises where the corrupted connection persists. If UDP Unreplied timeout is, for example, 10, and the NAT Keep Alive Interval is 20, then the corrupted connection will timeout or close. A new connection will be created, and everything will work fine.

Another problem can occur when the Keep-Alive interval is greater than UDP Assured Timeout (often 180 by default in consumer routers): the NAT hole will close due to the ATA not communicating frequently enough with the SIP server. In turn, incoming calls may, intermittently, not reach the ATA. Again, X_Keepalives expires is supposed to be 20 with FPL.

Getting access to both UDP Unreplied Timeout and UDP Assured Timeout settings in consumer routers may be difficult, if not impossible. Asuswrt-Merlin (https://asuswrt.lostrealm.ca/), third party firmware for Asus routers, does offer easy access to these two settings, which are found under Tools-->Other settings. In part, for this reason, I tend to use Asus routers. However, my understanding is that third party Tomato firmware has these two settings as well. So if your router supports Tomato firmware, that may be another option.

The keep alive interval for FPL is 20. The SIP Registration Failure Retry Wait Time is 120. I use 10 for UDP Unreplied Timeout and 117 for UDP Assured Timeout.



Proper device reboot order is
modem, followed by router (wait for it to be fully up and transmitting data), and finally ATA.

[mh1983]

Thanks, Lipton!

I have a RT-N600 which has limited third party firmware options.

I just noticed that the keepalive interval in my ATA is 30 (default). I'll change that to 20.