VoIP, SIP registration, and timeouts
May 8, 2013Quick comment… Everyone in the family has multiple devices— phones, tablets, game consoles, computers— and these tend to make network connections that linger. If you have a firewall like I do, the default TCP and UDP timeouts are probably too high (often 3600 seconds) and when everyone is around on the weekend you get poor performance and strange complaints about how things don’t work. Separately, I have an OBI100 VoIP device providing phone to the house. The OBI100 has a default SIP registration period of 60 seconds and re-registers after half the interval, this is a bit too frequent so I have mine set to 300 seconds. As I’ve found, if the firewall expires the connection quickly you can end up with what looks like a valid registration at the SIP provider and can make outgoing calls but incoming calls fail. I’ve worked around it by expiring connections at 360 seconds for TCP and 180 seconds for UDP.