Do you have the Horizon VOIP Cloud PBX and Hyperoptic and phones not working / ringing? We recently had this problem and one could say we ‘wasted a day’ but let’s better say ‘invested a day’ of time to get to the root of the problem and solution. To save others the pain and cycles, here is what we have learnt and solution.
If a client site is connected to Hyperoptic as an ISP and Horizon phones are not working then there are a couple of things to check:
Is the connection a Business Connection with Static IP? Business connections with Hyperoptic should automatically get a static IP service, but non business / home connections do not. Hyperoptic use a system called CGN - ‘carrier grade nat’ which does not work well with VOIP / online games and other applications. On a non business connection you have to pay £5 a month extra for the static IP. The problem is not that Horizon needs a static IP, but it needs to be able to signal back on a connection per standard methods. With CGN, hyperoptic share the same external IP over many many connections and effectively close outbound connections very fast and disallow back signalling.
Check that SIP-ALG is turned off. Hyperoptic support need to do this as only they have the ‘root’ account login for the routers. The ‘admin’ account does not show these details nor allow them to be set.
On the above (point 1 - assign Static IP / disable CGN) - HyperOptic support can enable a trial of fixed IP on a circuit, and it takes about 40 minutes (give an hour) for the process to complete once started. When the change happens, connectivity onsite will drop for a minute or so. You can also tell when this is done as the result you get from ‘show my IP’ will change from before to after.
Symptoms of this problem can include:
Can’t remote reboot phones from the Horizon VOIP Control Panel
Polycom VVX or Cisco VOIP Phones may be able to call out but do not ring inbound on Hyperoptic
Horizon Calls inbound may have no voice audio on connection on hyperoptic.
Softkeys / BLFs (Busy Lamp Fields) not showing on the phones.
Additional learning on Hyperoptic:
You can replace a HyperOptic router with a standard ethernet router / firewall. This does not need to be configured with any userID / PPOE / VLANS or password as everythnig is assigned by upstream DHCP on the external ports. NB - if you swap the router from the HyperOptic default router, then they can’t do as much troubleshooting as if they do supply / maintain the router & to be fair their standard routers are fine.
BIG NB:
On a recent support case, it was only late on that one of the HyperOptic support engineers in Sofia noticed that the connection was not a business connection. Previous support engineers there had either said that it was a business connection or supported the hypothesis that it was so be sure to question if this is an issue. For note in this case the CGN IP was 188.214.15.X and we’d guess that shared by many sites. The static IP assigned was 137.220.90.X
References:
See https://hyperoptic.com/help/technical-support/ and the question on 'IPV addresses'.
Snip from their website related to this which gave us a thought on ‘ah ..’ was:
Contacts:
support@hyperoptic.com & Tepephone support line 0333 332 1111- they can identify site from address, or MAC address of router (on sticker on back assuming original HyperOptic router in use).
Thanks to Claira Ross via Flickr for the header photo