[Asterisk-Users] Phones that work well through NAT

[Andrew Kohlsmith]

On Saturday 15 April 2006 21:12, jennyw wrote:
> We've been reasonably happy with Polycom SoundPoint phones, but we only
> have them installed on the LAN. I've read that they have problems
> working across NAT. So ... I guess I have a few questions. First, is
> there a way to get Polycoms to work well over NAT? If not, then are
> there phones of comparable voice quality that do work well over NAT?
> Without costing a lot more?

Polycoms (the IP501s at any rate) work EXCEPTIONALLY well through NAT.  It's 
as literally dead-simple as plug-and-go.  No configuration on the phone, and 
all you want is a nat=yes in their sip.conf entry.  That's it.  Seriously.

Olle's Symmetric RTP code is what makes it work so well.  I have two IP501s 
behind a factory-default WRT54G on regular consumer ADSL hitting an Asterisk 
box on a real IP.  The WRT54 has no configuration to reflect port-forwards 
and the only thing Asterisk has is nat=yes for those two extensions.  

It Just Works. And I'm still stunned by it.  :-)

Olle...  Thank you once again for the symmetric RTP code in Asterisk.  It's a 
godsend.

-A.