Use the tp vr1600v purely as a voip gateway

[nroulston]

I have just setup an Orbi RBK50 and connected it to my tpg (iinet actually) account. I eventually got that working by changing the vlan setting to 2 - thanks to those that came before me. My problem now is that I want to use the Archer VR1600v that I got from iiNet as the voip adapter for my landline as the Orbi doesn't have voip capability. I connected the Archer to the orbi, disabled all the wifi and the dhcp et al on it, set it to a static address, but the phone still does not work. I get a dialtone, but that's it. It won't dial out, or in. Of course, iinet (TPG etc) seem to have disabled the Telephony menu on the Archers. Has anybody got this to work? I really don't want to have to purchase a separate VOIP adapter - say a cisco SPA122 or something - when the Archer should do the job just fine.

[Will]

Hi @nroulston

Welcome to the Community!

If you have a TPG account, I would have told you that the setup you're aiming for won't work right out of the bat. For TPG customers, the VOIP settings are preconfigured to the modem we supply. In order for the homephone to work, it should be the main device since the modem needs to contain the authentication details itself.

Now I'm not sure if this holds true for iiNet accounts. We suggest, checking this further with iiNet support. You can reach them at 13 22 58. Please understand that though TPG and iiNet are under the same umbrella, we are still 2 separate entities, thus, have different databases.

Hopefully though, someone else in the community can provide their experience.

Regards,

Will

[nroulston · Accepted solution]

Solution:

I found a solution. It is to put a switch between the NBN and the routers. I think this will apply for both tpg and iinet (although they are the same, but different, they have both hidden the voip stuff the same way). Basically connect from the NBN modem to the switch then from the switch to the Internet port on the Orbi, and from the switch to the WAN port on the archer. Make sure the Archer has wifi turned off. Basically it's allowing me to use the archer purely as a voip service, with the Orbi doing everything else.

[woodsey]

Thank you very very much for those details. This may save me a bucket of time. I can now see how to utilise a very efficient router to provide all my lan clients (wired and wireless) while using the TPLink to provide the telephony to the connected ATA devices. Now the terrible management page issues I currently have can be circumvented by utilisng a second router. never thought about that option before. You are a godsend :-)

[woodsey]

I only have 1 public IP address and I need the traffic going to my LAN Gateway/firewall device to use that IP address just as I need the TpLink to connect with that IP Address.

I understand the topology okay and believe it will give me what I want but do both the TpLink and the Orbi logon to the same account or do you have the Orbi just dynamically connecting?

[Bruiser2074]

Hi nroulston,

My question is if you put a switch between the nbn HFC NTU and then connect the Archer 1600V2 as well as another Router (like the Orbi in your case), wouldn't that cause conflicts on the nbn NTU. Especially if both devices (orbi and Archer) are using the same login credentials to authenticate to TPG??

Can anyone from TPG comment whether multiple authentications would work behind the 1 nbn NTU?

I hit the exact same problem you did nroulston where I want to use a business grade router behind the nbn NTU, but then the VoIP of the Archer simply stopped working and there was nothing I could do to get it going (I think i'll start another thread to see if anyone ever found a way of making this work without putting a switch between the three devices).

[Bruiser2074 · Accepted solution]

Just an update on this from me...

I tested the setup with a switch in betwen the hfc nbn NTU and the TWO routers that I wanted to use (one Archer for the VoIP, and one business grade router) and sure enough, it does work HOWEVER the archer needed to be factory reset and would not automatically reconfigure itself.  I needed to add the manual configuration for the PPPoE connection.  Once I added these details manually, Voila! it worked and has been stable ever since (yippee).

so now I have:

nbn HFC NTU -> 'dumb switch'

                               -> 1 x connection from dumb switch to Archer VR1600 (this device runs the Voip and has no other connections to any device (wired or wireless)

                               -> 1 x connection from dubm switch to business grade router (EdgeRouter x (ER-X-AU))  this device runs the rest of my Lan environment.

This setup has been working for the last 3 days without issues after the Archer was re-configured.

Thanks for the original suggestion nroulston