Sonic.net

Hello!

I have Sonic fiber.

My employer sent me a Polycom phone that operates via VOIP.

Every outbound call results in the message, "the number you have dialed is not in service." (This includes numbers that I am certain are, in fact, in service, like my personal cell phone.)

My IT department has informed me that the problem may be that there is a firewall created by Sonic's own VOIP, and "there is one data setting that we need them to remove – the SIP helper/disable SIP."

I do not have a VOIP device plugged into my Sonic fiber.

My Polycom phone connects via wifi through a Sonic-provided Eero router.

Your help resolving this issue so that I can use my work-provided Polycom would be very much appreciated.

That’s an odd one. I can’t think of anything here that would impact the use of a VoIP device via our network. And I’m site we have thousands of customers who do so — I’ve got a similar Polycom work phone myself here at home in fact.

Has the phone’s provisioning been tested by your office telecom staff? Are they sure it’s correctly configured and has it been tested on another network successfully?

One possibility is that double NAT is causing an issue. VoIP uses a NAT traversal mechanism, so it shouldn’t cause an issue, but one way to check this would be to set the Eero for bridge mode in their app and see if that resolves it. This sacrifices access to some Eero features such as their paid Secure+ service, so the Eero app will squeal a bit about the downsides of bridge mode, but those complaints are primarily self-interest on their part. If it resolves your issue, yay.

Keep us posted!

My Eero already was in "Automatic" mode (not in "Bridge" mode). Any other ideas?

michaelmontano wrote:My Eero already was in "Automatic" mode (not in "Bridge" mode). Any other ideas?

I was suggesting trying bridge mode. That’ll eliminate double-NAT and may resolve the issue.

Thank you. I figured that out upon rereading your message. When I then tried to enter bridge mode, the gateway Eero could not connect to the internet, and the secondary Eero could not connect to the gateway Eero. Switching back to automatic from bridge mode only compounded the problem. In short, the proposed solution completely crashed my home internet—to the extent that my account wasn't even showing as activated by Sonic's technical support team, and I had to swap and reconfigure my Eeros. It took an hour and a half to get back to normal.

Well that's interesting - and clearly not what's supposed to happen. It should be an easy swap in the app. But bridge mode (and thus the elimination of additional NAT) is my best guess on why your work VoIP telephone might not be working. That could also be something that your enterprise's support could address by fixing the NAT traversal issue, if that's indeed the problem.

Or, it could be entirely something else. Do check that the phone is fully provisioned and working, that's another possibility.

Were you able to get this resolved?

Is the polycom phone wifi only or could you plug it directly to a port on the router ?

Is eero the only wifi or it is additional to the wifi on the router that is directly connected to the ONT (if on fibler)
Maybe try to connect directly to that wifi instead of the one from eero.

To check the phone is fine, you could also set a hotspot on your phone and have the polycom phone connect to that wifi.