So, I've arrived in Lancaster, PA for the annual TCI show, and I've set up shop in my hotel room. The hotel has both wifi and wired connections in the rooms. I brought along a router, plugged it into the hotel's lan jack, and everything is working just ducky except for one VERY annoying thing. I brought along a Cisco SPA-122 that I use at home flawlessly with voip.ms. I tried plugging it right into the lan jack but it won't pull DHCP on its own, which is bizarre, but whatever. If i put it behind my router, which is the current setup, it will boot up just fine, pull DHCP, and register with voip.ms. I can make outgoing calls no problem. Outgoing works perfect, caller ID is right on the receiving end, and as far as that goes, its all happy. Incoming calls fail. If I restart the device and call it right away, incoming works ok. I can also call it right after an outgoing call and it works. Soon as I let it sit for a little bit, incoming will fail again. I've tried messing with the keep-alive settings and a bunch of other NAT stuff, but no dice. I'm assuming it's something with the hotel's firewall? It's not my router, I've even put the ATA in the dmz, and still fails.

Thoughts?

Double NAT? Most likely

Also the hotel router will probably close that port after it goes idle.

Geeze Chris, if I was going to a trade show and staying in a hotel the last thing I would want to do is bring along a bunch of phone crap and screw with it all day. Forward your calls to your cell and have a good time!

Didn't know you were into the arborist business.

-Hal

Arborist??

The TCI show is Telephone Collectors International


The whole point is phone crap. HAHA

Nah, you were so busy playing with your phones in your hotel room that you didn't notice where you were.

https://expo.tcia.org/

-Hal

I never knew that was even a thing, Hal.

Does Voip.ms let you register a softphone to its service? If so grandstream has a nice free softphone.

They'll let you register darn near anything from what I can tell. I've had some issues trying to register some stuff, a polycom IP phone comes to mind. I also was having trouble getting Zoiper to register to them, I know it can be done, I'm just a real noob at voip stuff. I'm sure I had something set wrong. I'm trying to teach myself something new. Voip.ms is cheap, which makes it good to use for learning. I've managed to get a dozen or so things working with them. I think my issue is the "hospitality solution" in place at this hotel. This particular ATA registers and works just fine at home. This place has switched to some "Allbridge-One Connected Experience" product that is just annoying. I'm using my own router, plugged into the lan jack behind the desk, but even that runs through this ridiculous service. I have to "re-up" every so often because it shuts you out after a certain length of time. I stayed here last year and none of this nonsense was here. I plugged in, and I was off and running. Everything worked just fine. One interesting thing I've noticed, when I'm on the guest wifi, certain apps and things won't work right on my phone, social media things and whatnot, but when I'm connected to my own little private wifi I set up, they work just fine. My guess is they block out or throttle certain things. Voip is probably one of them.

We've noticed the hotels are cranking down port access, too. One of my clients has a morning show host that travels a lot and tries to do his morning show from his room. Sometimes the remote broadcast gear can connect, but it's getting tougher. Very rarely he can talk to an IT geek to help him get it to work...double NAT setups are a big problem.