UC320W LAN/voicemail problem

[dcnwadmin]

Hi,

I have a UC320w with 7 SPA525G phones in an office.  All have firmware updated as of a few weeks ago.  Works great except that signal is poor in the far end offices (2 bars with occasional dropouts).  All are operating wirelessly currently, and the ones with poor signal would be very difficult to wire in.  There's one line running to the back offices so I added a E2500 router wired to the UC320W.  It's set up with the same SSID as the voice VLAN, DHCP turned off, wireless security set same as the UC320W.  The phones in the back offices will attach to it as expected and the signal strength is uniformly great (4 bars on all those phones).  Phone calls out work fine on those phones. 

However, voicemail access doesn't work going through the E2500/LAN.  The voice prompt is garbled or goes silent, and seems to ignore any numbers I press.  Transferring calls fails too, I think, but I haven't played with that much.  Voicemail works fine when phones are operating wirelessly directly with the UC320. 

Are there some settings on the E2500 or UC320 that I can adjust to fix this?

Thanks in advance.

[Christopher Edgeworth]

Hi David,

I suspect the phones behind the E2500 router are NATed and not on the UC320W Voice subnet.  We don't expect a NAT on the LAN side of the UC320W between the phones and UC320W.  NATs can cause the problems you are experiencing.   I'm not familiar with the E2500 capabilities.  Instead of using a router, have you considered using a Wireless Access Point such as the AP 541n.  This supports the Wireless QoS (WMM) and can support both SSIDs and VLANs while allowing the phones to remain on the voice subnet.

Chris

[dcnwadmin]

Thanks very much, Chris.

The E2500 allows disabling of NAT, so I disabled it.  Unfortunately, that didn't seem to change anything.  Phones still call out normally, but other phone functions like voicemail or transfers don't work.  The E2500 also has a "bridge mode", which I tried, and got the same results.  Any other thoughts?

I'd be happy to try the 541n if it'll definitely work, but I'd like to try to understand why the E2500 doesn't work first so I don't repeat the same mistake with an even more expensive Cisco router.  I'm not too worried about QoS because the wireless network that the UC320W is running consists only of the 7 phones and won't have data (unless the phones need to also exchange data packets, I suppose).

I forgot to bring in cables today, but was going to try wiring one of the phones into the E2500 to see what happens.  I'll try that tomorrow, for what it's worth, but any other better ideas are very welcome.

-Dave