Ooma Forums

I have an Ooma that I'm trying to set up in a nursing home for my brother who has a brain tumor. The unit works on my home network. It works on my work network. It will not work on the nursing home network no matter what I try. I'm pretty certain that the nursing home is blocking IPs. In addition to the Ooma not being able to "phone home" and connect with the main facility there in California, random sites are inaccessible (for instance the Vtech phone site cannot be reached so that I can look up the manual on the Vtech phone I have connected to the Ooma). I called tech support and was told that the IP I needed to have whitelisted was 172.27.35.1. This is a private network IP just like 192.168.1.101 is. It is LOCAL and I can't get the dingbats on support to understand this. They insist that that is the IP needed to "talk" to the facility in California. It isn't. Does anyone know what the IP(s) are so that I can have them whitelisted by the nursing home IT people so that the Ooma can reach their California facility?

Thanks for any assistance you can provide.

The relevant Ooma IP address range could be 208.83.244.0 - 208.83.247.255, but that's just a guess. Is their networkcheck web site accessible from a browser? If not, then the nursing home firewall is probably blocking it. Otherwise, the page contains a link to test for other firewall issues, such as blocked service ports.

Thank you very much for the quick reply. I'm visiting my brother this evening so will see what the networkcheck web site shows. I'm wondering what all the Ooma does as I had an idea I could ballpark the addresses it used by looking at my router logs to see my Ooma talks to. There's some weird stuff going on based on what I'm seeing. Here's and example:
LAN IP address | Destination URL or IP address | Service or port number
192.168.1.141 208.83.246.102 3480
192.168.1.141 38.114.132.204 pop3
192.168.1.141 208.83.246.20 domain
192.168.1.141 208.83.246.21 domain
192.168.1.141 162.253.220.20 domain
192.168.1.141 208.83.246.20 domain
192.168.1.141 208.83.246.21 domain
192.168.1.141 162.253.220.20 domain
192.168.1.141 208.83.246.109 3480
192.168.1.141 217.180.209.214 ntp
I'm curious why a phone would need to talk to pop3.

Thanks again for the information.

Maybe Ooma uses pop3 to download voicemails, or firmware updates. They do list it among the service ports that they use for "administrative data and voice traffic". It also looks like Ooma uses additional ranges of IP addresses for such traffic: 38.114.132.192 - 38.114.132.223, 162.253.220.0 - 162.253.223.255, etc.

I really want to thank you for the suggestion regarding using the network tester. It was able to tell me that the router at the nursing home has SIP ALG active and we bumped into that blocking VOIP phones at my work when we moved over to fiber. There are numerous sites that recommend turning SIP ALG off because it causes more problems that it solves. Not sure what I will do if IT personnel at the nursing facility refuses to shut it off. If they won't then my brother's Ooma becomes a paperweight.

Thanks again for your help. I was really banging my head on the wall trying to figure out what the issue was.

Ooma Office recommends disabling SIP ALG (here and here), but Ooma Home doesn't mention it. If the Telo uses its own VPN tunnel for SIP traffic, then the ISP router shouldn't be able to see it. Otherwise, another (more complicated) option could be to add a personal router to set up another tunnel to a VPN provider.

It varies, but it's up at the moment, stable, and quiet.