Deploying Fonality Connect/Connect+ phones behind SonicWall UTM appliances

Fonality Connect is a hosted VoIP solution. Instead of deploying and maintaining an on-premise PBX, the customer uses a hosted PBX that is managed and maintained by Fonality on the Internet. This offers significant advantages to those customers that are do not have the resources or expertise to run their own PBX.

The customer only deploys phones on their company network. These phones are pre-provisioned to use SIP to connect with the hosted Fonality Connect PBX server located on the Internet.

This article describes how a SonicWall appliance should be provisioned in order to deploy Fonality Connect+ phones behind it.

To deploy Fonality Connect phones behind a SonicWall appliance, simply enable SIP Transformations.

• Login to the SonicWall Management GUI.
• Navigate to the VoIP | Settings page.
• Check the Enable SIP Transformations checkbox.
• Click the Accept button.

 
The above change is sufficient for most of the Fonality ‘hard’ phones and has been verified with following models:

• Polycom SoundPoint IP331 (running SIP Version 3.2.3.1734)
• Polycom SoundPoint IP550 (running SIP Version 3.2.3.1734)
• Aastra  9480i CT (running SIP Version 2.6.0.1007) and companion CT Cordless handset.

These phones arrive pre-provisioned from Fonality and can simply be connected to a LAN port of the firewall. They will obtain a DHCP lease and then connect to the pre-provisioned Fonality server to obtain configuration and account information.
 
When using the Fonality PBXtra soft-phone, the following settings need to be changed (on the soft-phone and not within SonicOS):

1. 'Send internal IP' set to Always. This is needed to ensure that SonicOS is entirely responsible for performing NAT.
2. 'STUN server' set to Manual Override with no IP address specified. (SonicOS does not support using STUN with SIP Transformations enabled.)
3. 'Enable ICE' should be unchecked. (SonicOS does not support using ICE with SIP Transformations enabled.)
4. 'Reregister every' changed to 120 seconds. (This is done to use the registration period as that for the Polycom and Aastra phones listed above.)
5. 'Transport' set to UDP. (SonicOS currently does not support SIP Transformations for TCP transport.)

The above changes were verified using a Fonality PBXtra soft-phone (eyebeam Version 1.1 3012r stamp 23021).