@scottalanmiller said in FreePBX Direct RTP Setup:

@JaredBusch said in FreePBX Direct RTP Setup:

You are spending a lot of time to save 200kbps max per intra office call. How much is this project costing versus how much will it benefit your company?

FTFY. Might be far less and it's split between the directions. And you give up some features like call control, monitoring, recording and reporting. Sure those might be trivial, but I'd think hard about @JaredBusch's comment here. Typically intraoffice calling uses an unnoticeably small bandwidth. It's totally trivial.

These are good points. Our FreePBX instance is regularly sending and receiving 3-4 Mbps of traffic, which isn't really that much. I'll have to see how much of this is internal/internal vs internal/external to see what sort of difference this would make.

@JaredBusch said in FreePBX Direct RTP Setup:

@anthonyh said in FreePBX Direct RTP Setup:

@JaredBusch I've only done blind transfers. During the transfer 1 heard our hold music if that makes a difference. I'll try with 2 and 3 talking before making the transfer and report back.

I am not sure if that is a good sign or not without seeing full logs and having something setup to test myself, but it should be. That music comes from the PBX and if the audio stream was still only phone to phone, you would not hear it.

I've never bothered to enable reinvite anywhere before so I am not clear on the exact flow of the audio stream when a reinvited call gets put on hold.

Why are you bothering with this by the way? Is there some bandwidth constraint causing the need for this functionality?

From what I understand the MOH is fine. Asterisk takes over the audo stream when necessary (to inject MOH for instance) from what I've read. I can confirm that it is working, as I can initiate a call between extensions that are registered on phones on the same physical network switch and same subnet, then unplug the uplink on said switch and proceed with the call like nothing happens. In that scenario placing the call on hold yields silence.

Again, I'm learning as I go...

No, there is no specific necessity for the feature, but if I can make it work properly I'd like to use it. Every little bit helps, and if I can keep the audio of intra-office calls from traversing WAN links, I'd like to do so.

@JaredBusch said in FreePBX Direct RTP Setup:

Is the call a blind transfer or did 2 talk to 3 first? Did that portion of the process have 2 way audio?

Ok, I did the following:

1 called 2 - two way audio

2 pressed the transfer soft key and called 3. 3 answered and there was two way audio between 2 and 3.

2 transferred the cal to 3. 3 could hear 1, but 1 could not hear 3.

@JaredBusch I've only done blind transfers. During the transfer 1 heard our hold music if that makes a difference. I'll try with 2 and 3 talking before making the transfer and report back.

I will start this off by saying that I haven't the slightest idea what I'm doing. I'm learning as I go.

So, the other day I stumbled across configuring FreePBX to hand-off the RTP stream to the end devices so that audio is direct between peers (when possible, of course). I have a test server set up with a handful of phones registered to it. Initiating calls between extensions works beautifully and direct audio works as expected.

However, I'm running into a snag with transferring calls. For some reason, call transfers do not work properly and result in one way audio. Here is an example situation:

1 calls 2. Call audio is perfectly fine. 2 transfers the call to 3. 3 can hear 1, but 1 cannot hear 3.

For what it's worth, the phone make/model does not seem to change the result. I've used Polycom SoundPoint 321's, 331's, Yealink T25G's, and Cisco SPA 525G's in my testing and all have the same result when transferring a call.

I have things set up as detailed here: https://sashikasuren.blogspot.pt/2013/08/peer-to-peer-communication-in-freepbx.html

Any ideas?

@wirestyle22 said in Ubiquiti AF5 Connection Question:

@anthonyh said in Ubiquiti AF5 Connection Question:

"UBNT-Chuck" from my Ubiquiti thread (the employee who initially tested this for me) re-tested and confirmed that in his environment directly connecting the two results in a 100Mbps link. Hopefully they fix that in a future revision.

Did they confirm that this is an auto-sense problem due to the POE injectors?

They just confirmed that it was a problem. Haha...

Unfortunately the issue I'm having still exists...I may start a separate thread about it if I get completely stumped.

"UBNT-Chuck" from my Ubiquiti thread (the employee who initially tested this for me) re-tested and confirmed that in his environment directly connecting the two results in a 100Mbps link. Hopefully they fix that in a future revision.

In the mean time, I put a different switch out there. We were originally using Ubiquiti's 5 port ToughSwitch. We had a spare, but I ran across a thread with lots of people complaining about throughput when using those switches in gigabit environments. The only other gigabit switch I have that'll fit in the cabinet we installed at the repeat site was a TP-LINK desktop switch. Not ideal, but if it resolves the issue it'll do for now.

@JaredBusch said in Ubiquiti AF5 Connection Question:

@anthonyh said in Ubiquiti AF5 Connection Question:

@Dashrender said in Ubiquiti AF5 Connection Question:

@JaredBusch said in Ubiquiti AF5 Connection Question:

@anthonyh said in Ubiquiti AF5 Connection Question:

@scottalanmiller

I do have a spare radio. I can pull the PoE injector from that one and swap it around to test I suppose.

The PoE injectors can definitely screw this up. They get in the way of the autosensing.

If you can hard set the adapters (though my spidey sense tells me that scott scolded me once because there's no longer a such thing - maybe I was dreaming that?).

I wanted to try this as a test, but it'll only let you hard set the interfaces to 10-half, 10-full, 100-half, or 100-full. No gig options.

Then your radios are likely only 100mbps interfaces and you get 1gbps from the injector?

No idea what the specs of this unit are. I guess I should look before spewing random crap.

The AF5's have a gigibit interface. The radio links are faster than 100Mbps.

Swapped out both PoE injectors and when directly connect to each other the link is still 100Mbps. Looks like I'm bringing back a switch.

@Dashrender said in Ubiquiti AF5 Connection Question:

@JaredBusch said in Ubiquiti AF5 Connection Question:

@anthonyh said in Ubiquiti AF5 Connection Question:

@scottalanmiller

I do have a spare radio. I can pull the PoE injector from that one and swap it around to test I suppose.

The PoE injectors can definitely screw this up. They get in the way of the autosensing.

If you can hard set the adapters (though my spidey sense tells me that scott scolded me once because there's no longer a such thing - maybe I was dreaming that?).

I wanted to try this as a test, but it'll only let you hard set the interfaces to 10-half, 10-full, 100-half, or 100-full. No gig options.

@scottalanmiller

I do have a spare radio. I can pull the PoE injector from that one and swap it around to test I suppose.

@travisdh1 said in Ubiquiti AF5 Connection Question:

@anthonyh said in Ubiquiti AF5 Connection Question:

@travisdh1 A home-made one that I left on my desk. According to a Ubiquiti employee (I posted on their forum) it should work. So I'm confused.

https://community.ubnt.com/t5/airFiber/Directly-Connecting-Two-AF5-s/m-p/1607575

Confusing for sure. At this point I'd almost just leave a switch in place if they're going to be this finicky about a direct connect

I'll need to find another switch if that's the case, which I can do. I was just hoping to simplify things.

@Dashrender said in Ubiquiti AF5 Connection Question:

Apparently I'm just dense - what are you connecting together at the remote site? The large AF5 outdoor antenna/dish/whatever to what?

You talk about connecting to radios together? what radios?

I have two Ubiquiti AF5 radios at a "repeat" site bridging two locations. Originally I had a switch installed here so the connection between the two was like so:

Radio <---> PoE Injector <--> Switch <--> PoE Injector <--> Radio

Because of the odd issues we've been having with the link, I suspect the switch may be part of the issue. So I'm trying to eliminate it by directly connecting the two radios like so:

Radio <--> PoE Injector <--> straight CAT6 cable <--> PoE Injector <--> Radio.

The problem is when directly connecting the two, they only negotiate 100Mbps. I need them to negotiate at gigabit.

Hopefully it makes sense.

@travisdh1 A home-made one that I left on my desk. According to a Ubiquiti employee (I posted on their forum) it should work. So I'm confused.

https://community.ubnt.com/t5/airFiber/Directly-Connecting-Two-AF5-s/m-p/1607575

So, I'm here at the repeat site (yay for mobile hot spots). I swapped my 1 foot homemade CAT5e cable out for a pre-made 7 foot CAT6 cable.

When I connect the two radios together, they still negotiate at 100mbps.

When I connect each radio to my laptop (running Fedora), the link comes up as gigabit.

So, now, I'm confused. Not sure what's going on here.

Ahh. This makes total sense. I learned something today!

@scottalanmiller said in Ubiquiti AF5 Connection Question:

@anthonyh said in Ubiquiti AF5 Connection Question:

With a straight cable, you should be able to connect two gigabit devices and have them link at gigabit speed, right??

Speed is not related to the straight or crossover cables or switches. GigE devices should do GigE speed unless something is wrong. cable too short could cause issues.

A too short cable can cause issues? Innnnnteresting. I had no idea. #themoreyouknow

The cable is 1 foot long CAT5e. Would that be a no-no for gigabit connections?

I have a 7 foot CAT6 cable that I'm going to swap it with. I'll just have to make it pretty via zip ties if it proves to solve the issue.

@scottalanmiller said in Ubiquiti AF5 Connection Question:

I agree that connecting directly makes the most sense. What's the purpose of the switch?

The idea was that if we needed to connect to the network at the repeat site we could just "plug in" and statically assign said device an IP. The network I defined was big enough so that there were a few left over IPs. However, how often this will be necessary is likely slim to none (it's just a convenience thing).

I directly connected the two using a straight cable (not a crossover cable) and they're only linking at 100 Mbps. It is a super short CAT5e cable made by yours truly (our fluke tester said it's good), but I'm going to try swapping it with a pre-made CAT6 cable.

With a straight cable, you should be able to connect two gigabit devices and have them link at gigabit speed, right??

We are using Ubiquiti AF5's to connect two of our sites together. Because these sites do not have line of sight between them, we are leasing roofspace off a neighboring building and using it as a "repeat" site.

We've recently started having trouble with the link, and I'm working on troubleshooting it. I'm not sure where the problem lies, but my suspicion is that it may be the switch we have at the repeat site.

Can anyone think of a reason why I couldn't just eliminate the switch and conenct the two radios together directly? I'd use a crossover cable if they're not auto sensing.

Thoughts?

@DustinB3403 lol, no it wasn't.