Had a call from a client who had switched their broadband connection to Virgin Media running on cable at 30Mb. The first Superhub they received blew up and the replacement unit had turned up but their previously working VoIP handset would no longer make or receive calls.
An onsite visit showed that once the VoIP Handset was rebooted it would successfully register to the VoIP service and receive calls, with no issues. However when making a call, the handset would dial and then report “Call failed” and would hang up, yet the call would still progress and ring the number dialled. An “interesting” aspect was that as soon as the call failed message was displayed, the Superhub would reboot itself !
A quick scour on the internet showed lots of similar problems and trying a range of port forwards,triggers,firewall settings made no difference to outgoing calls, this would always reset the router. It turns out the client’s AppleTV did this for a period of time before randomly deciding to behave itself.
A call to Technical Support was made and the only advice they could give was to switch to “Modem only” and use an additional router – strangely they went very quiet when I asked who was going to pay for the additional equipment.
Luckily we had a spare Linksys DD-WRT router kicking about, so this was wiped and installed for the client to test the use of Modem Only mode – one reboot later and everything is up and running !
The local Virgin Technical chap popped round with a replacement Hub to see if the same problem occurred – and it did so plans are underway to try and get hold of the next revision of the SuperHub for further testing.
Networking can be a weird and wonderful thing but we’ve never known network traffic to cause a piece of hardware to reboot !
