Last week I was having a terrible time calling 800 numbers, it seemed to be hit or miss, I would reboot the Motorola VT2442 Voice Gateway, however that did not always resolve the problem. I called Vonage tech support on July 20th, only to be disconnected when trying to get to second level support. I then tried to hook my Sony T60 Directv receiver and initiate a daily call. After a hour of research and trying multiple options, I could not get Tivo to successfully connect. I tried again on the 22nd, to discuss the 800 number problem which I thought might be related to the Tivo problem. This time I was able to get through to the second level and was quickly passed on to third level. It appears that first and second level are based in India and third level is based in the US. The tech setup a debug trace on my to view what was happening. When I dialed an 800 number digits were being dropped and there was no clear reason for it.
After about 2 hours we started focusing in on the Motorola VT2442 configuration. I had chosen only to use the Network Address Translation (NAT) feature and turn off the firewall feature, Since I am using a Netgear FVS318 behind the VT2442 to secure my private network, Ithought there was no need to duplicate firewall processing by having the VT2442 inspect every data packet. However in order to use port 80 on my Netgear FVS318 router, I had to turn on the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) feature in the VT2442. After resetting the VT2442 back to it's defaults (firewall on, DMZ off) everything worked fine. It finally dawned on me that the definition of a DMZ is a network that is between two firewalls.An external firewall connected to the Internet and an internal firewall connected toa private network. This meant that the DMZ feature needs to work with the VT2442 firewall feature turned on.Now I have the VT2442 firewall and DMZ features on and everything is working fine.
I successfully tested Tivo and was able to use my Intel based fax modem. I use a Cachecard in my Tivo which allows it to perform the daily call (it's really once every 5 or 6 days) via the Internet, however when you make a pay per view purchase, Tivo sends the billing informationusing the modem. I am guessing this isprobably for security reasons.
The quality of the calls have been good and since I made the change I have had no problems. My next step is to test Vonage with my alarm system.
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