[DungaBee]

I am having an issue with my Nuvio phones and while Nuvio's support has tried to be helpful, so far their suggestions have not worked so I am hoping maybe some of the VoIP techs here might have an idea.

Here is my setup:
I have 2 Polycom IP500 phones on my local LAN. Both are assigned a static IP by my router so I can use QoS based on the phone IP. My firewall is a BSD based firewall called pfSense (www.pfsense.com). It has all the usual stuff: firewall rules, NAT, QoS, etc. The phones register with Nuvio from my LAN and should receive inbound calls from Nuvio right to the phone (no local ATA involved).

My problem:
Most, but not all, of the time, if I call my phone system from the outside using my cell phone, I get my attendant greeting which is handled and hosted by Nuvio. I then dial my extension and instead of ringing, I get a long silence and then get my voicemail. It's trying to ring the phone but nothing happens locally.

At Nuvio's request, I opened my firewall to all traffic from their IP range. Specifically I added rules to allow the traffic, but I am not doing any port forwarding on the traffic or anything like that. That did not work so I called back. That tech told me to open specific ports (5060 and 2222 --> 2268). So I did that and left the other rule for their IP range in place as well even though it seemed redundant to add port rules when I was allowing ALL traffic from their range. But I did so anyway.

I still have the same issue though. I told my firewall to log packets processed by these rules and I can see the inbound SIP packet coming in from them when I try to call my phone from the outside. But, my phone still does not ring.

Maybe I am just being thick here, but to me, opening a rule on the firewall to allow the packet just prevents the packet from being rejected, but how would my firewall know where to send the packet? Should my phones being doing some sort of 'keep alive' with Nuvio so there is a path of sorts to route the traffic through. It seems like when that SIP packet arrives, it hits the firewall, the firewall then accepts it, but would not know where it is destined for, right?

Along those same lines though, I can not do a NAT of 5060 to my phone, because how would the other phone get traffic then, right?

Any suggestions from anyone are appreciated. I think my scenario would apply to anyone using straight IP phones with a provider without a local ATA or anything. Sorry for the long post, but I wanted to be sure to include everything I could think of right off the bat.

Thanks again.