Nextiva Win App (softphone) outbound is unusable, suggestions on what to do?

[David627]

Nextiva cloud service
Charter consumer grade modem
Netgate SG-2440 with 2.4.1
TGP-500 Panasonic SIP phone

Used wizard to create garden variety priority to VOIP, no gaming, etc.
The SIP phones have provided good (not great) voice clarity for about a year; happy with Nextiva performance and service.
LAN hosts 10 computers, tablets and smartphones.

Started using the Nextiva softphone on a win 10 pc (v 22.1.0.280) and if ANYTHING else hits the WAN, the outbound is absolutely unintelligible. Inbound generally OK.

Side by side test of the SIP phone and the softphone, this is a softphone only issue.

What to change in the traffic shaping to get the performance needed for the softphone app?

I've asked Nextiva, and they don't seem to understand the question. They of course sell their own firewall solution, and so light on the pfSense support.

Suggestions?

[klou]

I would try to get Nextiva's IP/URL (for the softphones) and add all traffic to/from to the highest priority queue.

What seems to be happening is that the softphone traffic is getting dumped into a default queue, not necessarily the SIP queue.

At least, in theory.  I haven't had a lot of luck in VOIP prioritization … need to tackle that again, soon.

[David627]

Nextiva says pfsense is no good:

Hi,
Your pf-sense firewall has issues with transcribing both VoIP Sip messaging and RTP traffic. Unfortunately there is no known fix within the recent firmware releases to help alleviate these problems. You must either replace your pf-sense with an another firewall or you may continue to utilize it, but there is no guarantee for quality of service. Please let us know if there is anything else you need because we would be more than happy to assist you.
Thank you,

Rafael R
The Amazing Service Team

[David627]

My experience with pfSense is that the VOIP with the Nextiva SIP is just fine for voice quality (altho not great).

Nextiva advises:

The simplest way to
avoid issues is to open up inbound and outbound traffic to/from
Nextiva’s IP addresses.
• IP Addresses: 208.73.144.0/21 and 208.89.108.0/22. This range
covers the IP addresses from 208.73.144.1 - 208.73.151.255 and
208.89.108.0 – 208.89.111.255.
• Ports: 5060-5090
• Transport Method: TCP & UDP
• Permission: Allow All Traffic

[David627]

So I've modified the wizard generated rule… which MATCHes the two IP addresses specified by Nextiva... to "any" instead of "UDP" (for both in and out).

Sadly, no change to the observed behavior of terrible audio outbound with any other WAN activity.

Any suggestions?

[David627]

I should elaborate, the topology is:

Nextiva cloud service
Charter consumer grade modem
Netgate SG-2440 with 2.4.1
Apple airport for wifi (bridged, naturally, with the SG-2440)
[6-12 computers and smartphones, all via wifi]
TGP-500 Panasonic SIP phone connected directly to the Apple airport as if it were a switch
[TEC wireless for the SIP phones]

The SIP phones are performing fine, and have for a year.
It is the smart phone on the Win 10 laptop, via wifi to the airport, bridged to the SG-2440, that has the crappy outbound audio