Audio Intermittantly Blanks Out for VOIPO Call

[mobilelawyer]

This is a problem I have not had before after two years with absolutely flawless service.

When making or receiving calls, the audio of drops in and out. There will be several seconds of crystal clear audio, followed by a couple of seconds of blank silence, then the audio pops back in.

There have been some changes in my set up. The Grandstream is not attached directly to one of the ports on the router. We changed internet providers and have the router in a different room, next to a cable modem. The Grandstream is in another room, fed off a Zytel power line adapter.

Might giving the Grandstream a static IP, as suggested in troubleshooting, solve this problem? And, must the Grandstream be connected directly to one of the ports on the router?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[JacobsLive]

This is a problem I have not had before after two years with absolutely flawless service.

When making or receiving calls, the audio of drops in and out. There will be several seconds of crystal clear audio, followed by a couple of seconds of blank silence, then the audio pops back in.

There have been some changes in my set up. The Grandstream is not attached directly to one of the ports on the router. We changed internet providers and have the router in a different room, next to a cable modem. The Grandstream is in another room, fed off a Zytel power line adapter.

Might giving the Grandstream a static IP, as suggested in troubleshooting, solve this problem? And, must the Grandstream be connected directly to one of the ports on the router?

Thanks in advance for your help!

No, it is not necessary to connect the adapter directly to the router provided that your network cable is typically less than 50' when connected directly to a router or have a powered switch feeding the line connected to the voip adapter.

If you are connected via powerline adapter, that might be causing the problem and it is not really recommended to connect voip adapter to a powerline adapter as powerline adapters has intermittent connection issues and it has lot of dependencies to work correctly including your home electric wiring.

If you can't do it by yourself, you might need little help from a pc/network technician to draw a network cable from router to the room where the ATA is located. Some electricians also can do that work.

[mobilelawyer]

You may be right about the power line adapter being the source of the problem, but I want to go ahead and assign a static ip to my Grandstream adapter first and see if that solves the problem.

[JacobsLive]

You may be right about the power line adapter being the source of the problem, but I want to go ahead and assign a static ip to my Grandstream adapter first and see if that solves the problem.

You may try that. But again the source of internet connection to the voip adapter is through powerline adapter and the problem might not be solved by assigning static ip to voip adapter. Good luck.

[mobilelawyer]

Moved the adapter to a connection to a switch directly attached to the router, and that solved the problem.

My Netgear router would only do port forwarding within the dchp range of the router, and would not allow an assignment to an address outside that range. After completing the port forward configuration and re-booting both the Grandstream and the Netgear, I could ping the adapter and get a response, but could not dial out or into the adapter. Got a fast busy signal.

I even tried to put the adapter in front of the router, and that would not work either. The voip phone service worked, but I could never get an internet connection through the router. I think the same thing happened when I tried to use this method two years ago when I got VOIPO service initially.

So I was relegated to putting the adapter behind the router, and not doing any port forwarding, and that worked fine. That is the way I had been set up before I changed providers and had to put the router in another room where a wired Ethernet connection was not possible, and I had to use a Zytel powerline adapter.

The Zytel works fine for streaming video, but apparently not for VOIP phone service as I started experiencing the audio drop outs during phone calls. Taking the powerline connection out of the equation solved the drop out problem.

[JacobsLive]

I even tried to put the adapter in front of the router, and that would not work either. The voip phone service worked, but I could never get an internet connection through the router. I think the same thing happened when I tried to use this method two years ago when I got VOIPO service initially.

Glad to hear your problem is resolved and identified Zytel as the root cause to the problem.

Regarding phone adapter not working as a router; this function might be oppressed in the adapter settings. You might need to login to the adapter and enable router function. Can't remember the exact procedure, but if it is a Grandstream device, you might be able to grab their user manual online and do it.