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We are in the process of switching VoIP providers because our old one was having issues with call quality, transfers, calls dropping, only one side can hear, etc (there were other reasons, but will stick with those for now). We have gotten a large amount of our phones moved over to this new provider, and surprise… call quality/connection issues. Our new provider has looked at our firewall config and set it like it should be and still having issues. I did some research and I see quite a number of forums stating that SonicWalls don’t play nicely with VoIP… so I have to ask. What is the community’s opinion/experience?

@Dell_Technologies @Cisco

15 Spice ups
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what sort of bandwidth you got dedicated to the phones? Sound more like bandwidth issues (or lack of it) rather than anyhting else to me.

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An entire 10Meg managed fiber. Internet traffic is routed out through a separate connection.

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and the usage on the 10mb line is what?

Any QoS on the voip line or at the Sonicwall for the VoIP?

this a shared LAN ot is there a vlan or physical lan for voip?

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I have heard conflicting information on this. We recently installed an Asterisk system and my PBX vendor insisted I not use a Sonicwall firewall. He claims to have had similar problems at several sites that went away after switching to a Cisco ASA. He has not worked on an installation with a Sonicwall in the last couple years.

I also spoke to another vendor that sells Asterisk systems and Sonicwall is their preferred firewall and they are moving away from the Cisco ASA line.

The best I can make out of it is that it may have been a problem with older units, but seems to have been fixed in current models. I would suggest you try updating the firmware on the Sonicwall before spending more $$$.

2 Spice ups
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Looking over the past 30 days, I can only see a few spikes where it went over 800k.

Two switches (dedicated for VoIP) go into one of the SonicWall interfaces,and I have a static route to put all of that traffic out of the fiber interface.

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Let me also add that the 2nd vendor installed an Asterisk system with a Sonicwall at a new office for us within the last year, and voice quality is not an issue.

1 Spice up
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I thought this might have been the case as well, but the 2400 we have is upgraded to SonicOS Enhanced 5.6.0.10-52o.

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Most firewalls in the SMB space play poorly with SIP. Typically you want to find the SIP-ALG feature of the firewall and shut it off as quite often it munges the traffic.

4 Spice ups
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I’ve turned off SIP-ALG (called SIP Transformations in SonicWall) and calls do seem to be behaving a bit better now. Hopefully it will stay that way. Thanks, guys.

2 Spice ups
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We had problems with NSA 2400 and 5.6 series firmware. It continued to get worse, until I upgraded to the 5.8 series, all problems went away. The latest is 5.8.0.3 and it has been very stable on the 6 sites I have running. We do VoIP with Cisco UC560 systems across our VPN.

2 Spice ups
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gfountain wrote:

I’ve turned off SIP-ALG (called SIP Transformations in SonicWall) and calls do seem to be behaving a bit better now. Hopefully it will stay that way. Thanks, guys.

SIP-ALG is a common culprit. No idea why anyone makes it an option - I’ve never heard of it working.

2 Spice ups
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Do I get the BA for that one?

1 Spice up
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To update this (for whatever reason it’s flagged as a discussion… so I can’t mark BA. Probably something stupid I did) the issues continued for a bit. Still calls dropping randomly and whatnot. So after a 5 hour call with SonicWall, I am finally escalated to tier 3. As soon as I got on the phone with him and told him the make and firmware version, he groaned. Apparrantly there is a “bug” in that version of the firmware (that has been out for months, and is still the most current release) that causes 16-20% packet loss for certain things on certain interfaces. They sent me the early release of the next firmware that supposedly fixes this little issue.

Yes. I was mad.

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Were you using the 5.6 series firmware? If so, I’m pretty certain going to 5.8 will fix your issue. I didn’t realize that it’s a known bug. It certainly explains the bad performance we were having with our phone system.

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Yeah, 5.8 is what they sent us. It’s still in the “pre release” stage so who knows what quirks it’ll have if live firmware has packet loss…

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gfountain wrote:

An entire 10Meg managed fiber. Internet traffic is routed out through a separate connection.

Sonicwall has great routers, but we’ve experienced a lot of issues with them when deploying in complex networks that also contain VoIP…

Still it sounds like the firmware fix has solved the issues for now, but I wanted to outline a couple of other things to consider should the fix prove to be temporary:

  1. Check all switches to make sure they unmanaged, or, if they are managed, at least put them on “pass through” mode; managed switches tend to cause issues as they can give conflicting directions which cause voice quality issues. I understand that this may not be ideal depending on your security needs.
  2. If you only have moderate security needs or if the phones are running on their own network then a great router is the Edgewater 4550; it supports a large number of devices and has some serious QoS (they used to be in VoIP or something, so their QoS is phenomenal)

Anyway, these are just a couple of “saving throws” in case the firmware fix doesn’t stick.

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Did 5.8 correct the issue? I am having the EXACT same issue and was actually loading 5.8 and rebooting and saw this thread.

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No, I had several calls with their tech support, and among them they couldn’t even agree on the type of browser I should be using to access the thing. Much less what was happening with the VoIP traffic.

Fed up with that, i took an old Dell server I had laying around, installed Vyatta on it, set up the firewall, and VoIP worked beautifully. Call quality is so good that it sounds as if the person is standing i the room with you. It’s fantastic.

I know that’s not exactly what you were looking for, but somethig about SonicWall just did not play nicely with our VoIP provider. Our solution was replacing it, and it worked fine. Your milage may vary.

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Ouch - definitely not good news for me. I do appreciate the followup. Thanks!