@jamespa Although sharing many of the same philosophical sentiments about the impact of technology on the human condition with Ted Kaczynski or Heidegger, I gave serious consideration to trying out a 5G router to decouple myself from the ISPs. If you can get a reliable signal it seems an economical and adequate option, one day I will be brave/stupid enough. I was previously using youfibre, they started out brilliantly but went the same way as virgin customer service and I had at least 10 attempts to get a fault resolved without ever having it fundamentally reviewed. Rather unwisely they did this just at the point my contract was terminating.

Posted by: @jamespa

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Posted by: @papahuhu

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Third-party VoIP often fails on the Virgin Media Hub 5 due to restricted NAT settings, SIP ALG (Application Layer Gateway) interference on port 5060, or firewall restrictions. To fix this, try setting the Hub 5 to modem mode and using a separate router, or ensure third-party SIP traffic is not being blocked. 

Hmm.  Basically they have tied it down in a way that might frustrate VOIP.  To make matters worse, because of the way VOIP works, there are 4 separate things that could go wrong namely:

1. outbound signalling (essentially setting up the connection when you dial a number)
2. inbound signalling (setting up the connection when someone dials your number)
3. outbound media (your voice once you are connected following the signalling phase)
4. inbound media (the third party voice once you are connected following the signalling phase)

When I had a 4G dongle for a while (whilst Vodafone were messing up my broadband) 1-3 worked, but not 4, with the result that calls connected, the other party could hear me but I couldn't hear the other party.

 

Posted by: @papahuhu

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perhaps I’m best waiting for the hardware and having a fiddle to see if it might work without doing this.

Yes thats what I would do.  There is some discussion here and it looks like some have got it to work without switching to modem mode.

A&A say they wont provide support for any NAT situation, which is a bit of a pain but entirely understandable.  However they do give good configuration details here

This is exactly the kind of thing that gets me angry. Not @jamespa's comments, of course, but the heavy-handedness of the config as provided to the customer if the original comments are true.

Virgin Media have no business restricting the customer in this way. It is reasonable, of course, to configure to restrict if it's going to protect VM's network or if it ensures the law is enforced, but clearly (if they're telling you it'll work if the hub acts like a modem) this has nothing to do with VM's network; it's purely to restrict the customer. IMHO, if it's attempting to discourage customers from using third party VOIP providers and push them towards VM's solution, it smacks of anti-competitive behaviour.

All that said, @jamespa is absolutely right; the simplest thing to do is a bit of fiddling to see what does and doesn't work once the A&A service is set up. Also, to save you battling with the IP phone to start with, I would suggest you troubleshoot with a VOIP app on your mobile phone. That way, you can set it up with wifi disabled so it connects to A&A via the mobile network and you can confirm successful configuration. You can then put the phone in airplane mode and enable wifi and see if you're still able to use VOIP. If so, that traffic must be going through the hub and so should work just as well for the IP phone as for the mobile's app. If not, you haven't even taken the IP phone out of the box and you know the hub is the only place the restrictions could be.

God, I hate companies that don't play fair.

I had occasional problems with virgin but I found the service very reliable overall. 

My main problem was with the way they pushed to remove the real landline, mixed with expiry of the long term contract and going to a very high monthly cost. That was escalated up virgin and to ofcom, that found in my favour. But they could not force virgin to reinstate the landline. The recurring problem was how Virgin would try to increase the rate whenever the long term contract would expire. 

The whole thing came to an end when I had a complete outage for 2 days. I managed to get them to pay for a router (that can work with 4g) and by then moving to community fibre became painless. I just had to call them once, straight after the fibre install, as we were not getting good bandwidth. They misdiagnosed but sent a technician onsite, which seemed ideal. He swapped the modem. So this made it very simple to do all the tests with him on site, without any ticketing (he took care of the comms with the colleagues..).

And since then, the service has been flawless. I was a bit concerned as it is relatively cheap.

I am now planning to get a Linksys sip box or similar to get the dect phones back into use! 

Posted by: @majordennisbloodnok

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IMHO, if it's attempting to discourage customers from using third party VOIP providers and push them towards VM's solution, it smacks of anti-competitive behaviour.

Exactly that.  In Vodafone's case the underlying problem is that, for some inexplicable reason, they insist on associating a telephone number with a broadband line, even if the line is fibre and the telephone number VOIP (for those with less network knowledge, this means that they are technically completely independent, just like the BBC website, or any other, is completely independent of your broadband line).  

They have then compounded this by writing  systems to provision a broadband line and telephone service with its associated number, or to disconnect a broadband line and telephone service with its associated number.  Thus if you want to port the number out but retain the line (a service which OFCOM obliges them to provide), the only way they can do this is a complete disconnection and reconnection.  That would be OK if they could do it in 24 hours, but it takes a month, much of which is consumed because they cant provision a new service until the old one is flushed from their system, which, even though its technically disconnected, doesn't happen until next billing cycle.  Only then do their systems allow them to place an order with Openreach for the reconnection, which then takes several days to action.  Its crazy and means that, with 20:20 hindsight, a move to another provider would be quite a lot quicker than the disconnect/reconnect process Vodafone insist on using.

To make matters even worse most of their staff dont know the process and/or dont know how long each stage takes, and the voice service they insist on providing whether you want them or not lacks features like voicemail and indeed most other common features.

I am getting to hate large corporations.

I don't doubt Virgin Media's ability to run a reliable network, @batpred. The problem is that how I use my Internet line (as long as it's honest, decent, legal and truthful) is none of my ISP's business. Sneakily adding in restrictions to inhibit the use of competitors to services my ISP provides is just plain wrong unless, of course, it's written into the contract and I'm therefore aware in advance.

That plainly isn't the case here, since Virgin Media seem happy to let the hub accommodate those competitors' services in one mode even if not in the other. It's demonstrably not a necessary technical restriction; it's purely an arbitrary modification for Virgin Media's benefit.

@majordennisbloodnok I understand your point, I agree that should an ISP be taking that path of restricting access, that would be anti-competitive, etc. 

I see what @papahuhu posted, but based on my experience I shared earlier (when I had virgin and the VM hub was working as a router and we were making voip calls including localphone SIP without issues), I am not discounting that a) that q&a or troubleshooting content may be out of date or b) it may not apply to all their network or supplied equipment. If there is a restriction, it would not be commercially driven as that statement implies that setting the hub as a modem could remove technical restrictions on using a SIP service. The more I think about it, the more it seems some guidance in need of technical review..

As for Vodafone and @jamespa comments, it does seem someone wrote a process with a very commercial mindset! I remember another case with them, regarding data charges. The way corporate discounts were designed would contribute to limited transparency, making effective cost management very difficult.. 

Virgin's disconnection just required me to pay 30 days for a service I was not using.. A very small price to pay for the reward of 4x the speed for around half the cost..

Posted by: @batpred

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If there is a restriction, it would not be commercially driven as that statement implies that setting the hub as a modem could remove technical restrictions on using a SIP service.

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I would love to be proved wrong, but the hub's "modem mode" is also often referred to as "bridge mode". In other words, it stops the hub acting as a router and gets it acting as a bridge which, being that low level, bypasses all the higher functions like firewall, hence why the VOIP service can then work.

These higher functions - the firewall and the implementation of a SIP application level gateway - aren't configured like this without some active intervention by Virgin Media. That therefore directly demonstrates that this IS a conscious decision by VM and, in all likelihood, commercially driven.

@majordennisbloodnok 

It is not about being wrong or not.

To some extent, there could be a commercial angle to not facilitating the use of third party services or even creating unnecessary technical hurdles. 

It is certainly not the same level that we used to see, where providers would insist it was within their rights to restrict use of other telephony services. 

Anyway, I did manage to use sip services when using a VM hub in router mode. 

Posted by: @batpred

@papahuhu 

To some extent, there could be a commercial angle to not facilitating the use of third party services or even creating unnecessary technical hurdles. 

It is certainly not the same level that we used to see, where providers would insist it was within their rights to restrict use of other telephony services. 

Anyway, I did manage to use sip services when using a VM hub in router mode. 

The underlying problem is that broadband is a fairly simple utility, but the providers have built their business on (what was) added value services (eg voice).  This problem was discussed 30 years ago when the direction of travel and its inevitability became clear. 

Once broadband is fast enough, which for most people it is, the only competitive elements are uptime and cost.  The ISPs depend on openreach for the last mile, so they have only partial control of the former, which drives a race to the bottom.

Thus it's almost inevitable we end up with a highly rigid 'service' where everything is run to minimise cost for the basic offering, and thus anything beyond that, even if it's legally mandated, becomes clunky or designed to tie you in to the services with higher margin.

@batpred I’ll keep this brief (well, by my standards anyway!😉) We were with VM and they very high handedly switched us to VOIP with very little warning not long after we had invested in large-key, loud-speaking telephones that we could use all round the house as I had extended the wiring years before. VM were not interested in existing facilities and left us with just an adaptor on the back of the new hub. The ‘engineer’ went outside as I was enquiring about connecting to the new socket giving the impression he was just going to his van. In fact, he got into his van and left us! We left VM soon after this and went to Zen Internet that uses City Fibre. We pay a fiver (I think it is) per month for VOIP and purchased ‘Dect Compatible’ wireless phones; of course DECT isn’t DECT it seems and eventually Panasonic accepted the phones back for a full refund. Our Zen Internet came with a Fritz Box and we purchased some Fritz phones. They are fine and provide clearer sound than we ever experienced previously at any time. Regards, Toodles.

Posted by: @toodles

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Our Zen Internet came with a Fritz Box

In have a fritzbox, purchased secondhand, and I must say it is an exemplary consumer router IMHO.  As well as the usual broadband and mesh wifi it supports VOIP termination, acts as a DECT basestation (I have Gigaset DECT phones), an answering machine (well 5 actually), fax gateway, has an analogue port for legacy phones, supports inbound VPN for remote access, as well as lan to lan VPN if you have a second home and will also act as a simple NAS/media server. 

There are commercial grade routers out there with even more flexibility, but for a consumer product this really nails it.  German engineering and it shows!

@jamespa Indeed, it certainly provides all we require; due to thick walls we have had to employ 2 of their repeaters but now have wifi over 100 feet down the garden! We have a Synology NAS so have not needed to investigate that Fritzbox facility - but as you say, it is a very neat bit of German engineering! Toodles.