Disclaimer: The requirements below will not guarantee that the router will work properly, but they should get most routers working.  Outdated and/or unstable router firmware and other network issues can cause unexpected phone issues that changing the settings above cannot resolve.

  1. Disable SIP ALG. 
    • This is the most important and critical setting to change.
    • This is also known as SIP Transformations
    • If you don't have an option, call UNIVERGE BLUE™ Technical Support to use our SIP ALG Detector Tools to verify is a device has SIP ALG or not.
          
  2. Ensure the router/firewall does not block the phones' NAT Binding/Keep-Alive packets that are sent every 15 seconds. 
    • Most routers do not block the phones' Keep-Alive packets by default, but many high-end firewalls, like Barracudas, do.
    • Some firewalls don't have an option to allow the packets, so an alternate solution is to set the phone's UDP session timeout to 300 seconds since the phones send a SIP packet re-registration request every 5 minutes.
          
  3. Allow phones to connect outbound to UNIVERGE BLUE™ Cloud Voice servers:
    • Most routers/firewalls allow this by default since the UNIVERGE BLUE™ phones & other devices initiate the outbound connection to our servers, which isn't a security risk.
    • However, some advanced firewalls/security appliances and highly-restricted-networks may require manually creating rules to do this. Please contact UNIVERGE BLUE™ to obtain the IPs that need to be whitelisted. 
          
    • This step is only needed if you have or plan to purchase Polycom phones:
      • Disable DNS proxy/relay on all DHCP and DNS servers on your network
      • Set the DHCP DNS servers (DHCP option 6) to a set of efficient DNS server addresses such as:
        • Google's DNS:
          • 8.8.8.8
          • 8.8.4.4
        • Or OpenDNS:
          • 208.67.222.222
          • 208.67.220.220
      • The reason the DNS servers above need to be used is because many ISP or LAN DNS servers take too long to relay DNS lookup requests, causing the Polycom phones to intermittently lose registration. 
      • If you must use your own private DNS server addresses, then you will need to setup Stub DNS Forward Zones on your own private DNS server, like a Windows Server, that forwards all requests for UNIVERGE BLUE™ directly to our DNS server.
        • Please contact UNIVERGE BLUE™ to obtain the IPs if you need them.
    • The phones and other UNIVERGE BLUE™ devices must be behind a NAT-enabled firewall and must get their private IP addresses via DHCP.
      • The phones and other VoIP devices cannot be configured with static private IP addresses or public IP addresses.
            
    • This is needed for call quality monitoring and troubleshooting purposes:
      • Allow WAN pings from our Call Quality Monitoring Servers.
             
    • Strongly Recommended:
      • Setup Bandwidth Management/Rate Control/Traffic Shaping to reserve the exact amount of bandwidth your phones need at all times.