sundance-communications.com Forums Telephony Discussion Phone & VoIP Systems ESI Telephones & Systems IP Phone over wireless bridge??

Has anyone run into an application similar to this? - Main building with about 40 phones - building #2 is located about 800' away and needs 2 or 3 phones and 2 or 3 pc's. We put in a wireless access point with directional antennas on each side and put them in point to point bridge mode and the link works great. Problem is local IP phones will work in the main building but not in the outbuilding - apparently the can't access the ksu over the bridge - any thoughts???

I know you run into latency issues when going over wireless. That's the only thing I can think of. We tried a Comdial IP product over some wireless extenders, and the voice quality was bad (due to latency). I would think that you should at least be able to get them to connect, though.

Make sure you're not blocking any ports over the wireless link. Not familiar with ESI, but on Toshiba there's an option for 802.1p that will prevent the phones from working unless every device between the KSU and phone supports it. Check for any quality-of-service settings also.

Following up on the last comment, ESI uses UDP Port 59001 and 59xxx, xxx being the extension number of the IP phone.

Just an FYI to everyone - I never got the local IP phones working across the wireless bridge but remote ip phones fired right up and the sound quality was excellent.

That sounds a bit odd. What does your network topology look like? Can you describe the layout to me, including routers, switches, wireless devices? I'm just trying to figure out why locals wouldn't work.

Main Building has the x class system with ip card connected to a 24 port switch, also connected to that switch is a wireless access point. Second building has a wireless access point connected to a 24 port switch and the ip phone is connected to that switch. Wireless access points are configured in point to point bridge mode. At this point nothing else is connected to the switches. D-link says it should work, ESI says it should work but it doesn't!!. By going to remote phones it operates at layer 3 using ip addresses versus layer 2 with mac addresses.

Can you configure the ESi to work with different latency? In my Tadiran switches I can set the phones to work with more latency and different compressions.

I don't believe so. At least I can't think of anywhere to do that. I know on our Comdial systems we can.

The problem sounds like a limitation of the APs. I had a similar problem with some Zyxel Wireless Bridges. Not with VOIP, but just with data. Zyxel said they would work in this configuration, but they never did. Just like with Linksys, just because a manufacturer says something will work doesn't mean it will in every case.

We use Alvarion bridges with data and voip.
no problems.