Why are my calls disconnecting? I’m not in an elevator!

We ran into a bit of a troubleshooting situation fairly recently. A few different clients were reporting that calls were disconnecting. Not only were calls disconnecting, but they were disconnecting at reproducible durations. Right away, given the nature of the drops, we can rule out normal every day occurrences, like horrible cell phone reception or driving through a tunnel.

During the troubleshooting period, we found a common ground between the two clients. They were using softphones from CounterPath. One client was using their free offering, X-Lite, whereas the other client was using one of their commercial softphones, eyeBeam. Because both of these clients are developed by the same company, it was easy to compare settings and preferences.

Fortunately, we’ve seen and dealt with this before, but due to the age of the post, it took a bit of memory jogging to recall the exact issue.  After some re-adjustment to the client softphones, calling began to flow in the desired fashion.

To look back on this, it seems like a pretty awful idea to have a setting enabled by default that can be 100% responsible for calls ending when they certainly shouldn’t be. In my opinion, this is a fairly poor design decision and perhaps CounterPath should sort that out. Considering that the referenced post was made more than 5 years ago, I will not be holding my breath for this setting to be modified in the default installation. I can hope though.