Is your ISP or hotel blocking VoIP? A simple method for anti-blocking

The growing mainstream acceptance of VoIP for both business phone and home phone purposes has presented serious challenges to companies that offer both Internet and phone services. Diminishing revenues from lucrative market segments such as long distance cell phone usage have apparently prompted some Internet-and-phone providers to block VoIP traffic on certain networks, notably those used for portable internet connections.

Hotels are also getting into the blocking game, as they'd prefer to force visitors to place calls via their exorbitantly expensive in-room phone service.

If you've ever been frustrated by your inability to use a VoIP service, and you suspect that your ISP or hotel may be responsible for blocking VoIP traffic, business VoIP provider Easy Office Phone may have a solution for you.

Engineers at Easy Office Phone investigated reports from portable internet users and hotel guests of being unable to connect to the service using soft phones such as X-Lite or Bria. They discovered that certain large providers and hotels seem to block VoIP traffic on port 5060, which is also the port most commonly used for VoIP communications (at least those employing the popular SIP protocol).

The solution was fairly simple: Easy Office Phone added a new port to their proxy servers, to allow customers to communicate with the servers on ports other than 5060.

As an example, if you're using X-Lite to make and receive VoIP calls, you have to specify a domain in your account settings. Your entry might currently look like the following:

siptraffic.myvoipprovider.com

If you're suddenly unable to connect after switching to a portable internet device or when working from a hotel, ask your VoIP provider if they offer an alternative port on their proxy server. Assuming that they do, you may be in luck. Try adding that value (let's say it's port 50600, for example) to X-Lite's domain value:

siptraffic.myvoipprovider.com:50600

Easy Office Phone business and residential customers have confirmed that this method solves the issue. Note that the domain value might be formulated differently, depending on the type of soft phone you use.

It's not a perfect solution - not all VoIP providers will offer an alternative proxy server port, and some ISPs and hotels may use more sophisticated means of detecting and blocking VoIP traffic. Still, if the above problem sounds familiar to you, then this workaround may well ease your VoIP blocking pains.