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Phone does not ring! (router setup and ports)

posted Aug 7, 2013, 5:41 PM by EZvoip Co   [ updated Mar 8, 2021, 9:47 AM ]
The following applies to you only if you tried more than one kind of phone and none of it rings when attached to your ATA (NOT softphone!). Otherwise, have a look at our guide on changing some more obscure settings.

One quick way to troubleshoot this problem is making sure that there is only one device / softphone registered for each account, as having more than one registration increases complexity. To eliminate potential issues, unregister or turn off all but one device or softphone, then use your mobile phone to call (or ask a friend to call you). If that one device or softphone rings, you have solved your issue. See our article on using multiple devices or softphones.

If you are able to place outgoing calls but cannot receive incoming calls (and people calling you tell you that it does not even sound like it's ringing), chances are your router and / or firewall is interfering with SIP / VoIP communications.

It is virtually impossible for us to help you set up your firewall, as there are quite a few brands and configurations. We recommend using a router that is supported by DD-WRT. Still, there are a few steps you can take to possibly resolve your issue.

If you have an ATA (hardware device) such as PAP2T, you can ensure that the problem is with your router by setting both an Admin and User password on your device (if you have not done so already) under the System tab (/admin/advanced) and then connecting the box directly to your Internet modem, bypassing your router. If the phone rings when you call it, you can be sure that the problem is with the firewall component of your router.

Most new routers should work without any special setup. The ports generally used by SIP / VoIP are 5000-5500 for UDP and TCP and 10000-20000 for UDP. We use more specifically UDP 5060 (default) and additionally 5080 and 42872. You need to ensure that they are available and not reserved in the router for something else. (Though in most cases you don't need to do anything special for SIP / VoIP to work, since your service is not working, you need to check.) If you do not have access to your router / firewall configuration and suspect that someone else has messed with it or made certain changes that caused your service to fail, you may go into your device advanced configuration, under "Line" and change your default port (5060 for Line1 and 5061 for Line2) to one of the aforementioned alternatives, either 5080 or 42872.

Finally, if that does not work either, you might want to reset your router using the 30-30-30 hard reset:
  1. when the unit is powered on, hold down its reset button for 30 seconds
  2. while still holding down the reset button, unplug the router from power and hold for an additional 30 seconds
  3. still holding down the reset button, turn on power to the router again and hold for 30 more seconds 
After this process (a total of 90 seconds) is complete, your router should be restored to its factory default state. Note that your particular router may not require the full 30-30-30 procedure. For example, some routers can at times be hard reset after only 10 seconds and without power cycling.

Once your router was reset, set a password for administration and check to see if your service was fully restored. If it was not, let us know.
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