Gateway

If you are unfortunate enough (like me) to live in an area where you get absolutely no phone signal on any network, enter the Vodafone Gateway.  This uses your existing broadband connection as a VOIP gateway.  however this is not without its problems.  Usually if you live in a ‘no signal’ area then you live in an area with low internet bandwidth speeds and no cable (yes I live in the dark ages).  I believe that Vodafone run their own QOS protocol from the box, however internet downloading can reduce the quality of the incoming voice signal.  and if you are uploading, you will be able to hear people fine, but they will complain that your voice is very jerky.

As I am also running a hardware firewall I struggled to see that the device should just ‘plug and work’ as stated in the gateway documentation.  Through research and a lots of calls to the helpdesk I managed to weedle from them a list of ports that the gateway needed DMZ or port forward access to.. After I had added these to my firewall runtime, up it comes all bells and whistles.  HOWEVER they still have not ironed out the HSDPA access over the gateway, as this crashes my gateway every time, requiring a hard reset of the device.

Here is a list of port forwards to IP addresses that you need to allow access to

NTP on UDP-123 to 212.183.133.181

NTP on UDP-123 to 212.183.133.182

Ping on ICMP-8 to 212.183.133.181

Ping on ICMP-8 to 212.183.133.182

ESP on IP-50 to 212.183.133.177

IPSEC NAT Traversal on UDP-4500 to 212.183.133.177

ISAKMP on UDP-500 to 212.183.133.177

Comments welcome