We've been selling Cisco Meraki for years and I can't believe that I honestly missed these epic little things being released. Definitely going to consider them for future deployments. ... View more

Hi Alex   Thanks for the response,   I think we're all clear on why this is happening, we've simply raised that this behaviour creates an undesirable and non-working environment for hosted telephony applications. It's very important that we start delivering some energetic air quotes around the phrase 'working as intended'.   You're hit the nail on the head here with your statement below:   "This could be possible to do, however, it means that if the primary WAN fails, your phone will not failover (and cannot be manually failed over per my suggestions) until the primary WAN is restored."   This is exactly what we want to be able to enforce. As failing over breaks the hosted telephony environment when the primary WAN is restored, it would be preferable for us (and other users above) to prevent this happening in the first place.   You didn't quite answer my question when I said that a user above was specifically told by a Meraki support engineer that this was already possible to achieve on the back-end. Have you been able to investigate that please?   If the feature doesn't exist, it's certainly worthy of Make a Wish. But someone has apparently been told it's already achievable which could well mean an internal training issue needs to be escalated.   Can you please advise further on that.   Kindest regards   Dave @ Forever ... View more

Hi Alex   Thank you for your reply,   First-off, if that is the case then why has someone posted above saying that Meraki support have advised them that it is possible to restrict fail-over behaviour for VoIP traffic specifically? Is this fictional, incorrect, or could there be some confusion between Meraki engineers as to what granular control can be provided upon request?   Secondly, in our case this situation has been triggered by two primary WAN outages in the past two months of just three minutes and seven minutes respectively.   We've therefore had a Meraki support engineer extend our fail-over period at this site to ten minutes, which would only cause the site to fail over during an extended outage beyond that time-frame. Obviously we don't desperately want site internet to go down but we would certainly rather see a brief sub-ten-minute outage than an unrecoverable telephony problem that requires manual intervention.   Silent audio for hosted telephony systems following a WAN fail-over event is not 'expected behaviour' and you have numerous examples of users encountering and complaining about this. If the granular fail-over control to which I refer is not possible, what about some kind of software implementation for your 'fix' options 2 and 3?   Meraki is a software-defined networking stack. I can't see why there would not be a way to implement a software function to force cessation of WAN2 traffic when WAN1 is restored, or prevent fail-over for certain traffic where it causes technical issues. Even if the best you can do is simply invoke a software function to simulate your point 3 to remove the WAN cable manually (really... in 2019 we're pulling cables?).   I suppose I could probably simulate this behaviour by changing the WAN parameters to something non-existent and back, but then if the other WAN connection goes down again at that exact second I'd be left with an non-contactable site (which I could place some safe money will happen under Sods Law).   And yes, I consider a full reboot (which didn't actually work in our problem environment when I tried it yesterday) to be a sledgehammer to squash a fly. Especially if the Meraki is handling inter-VLAN routing at L3 to access internal resources which would be disrupted rather than 'just' internet (and the phones of course).   Rather than saying 'OK you're unhappy and it doesnt work properly with your telephone system and it causes outages that require manual intervention but it's working as intended' can you please raise a case to leverage the considerable advantages of a Cisco SD-WAN networking solution and look at 'prevention rather than cure' fix, particularly with the growing proliferation of hosted telephony.   After all, that's why we buy (and sell) Meraki.   Many thanks ... View more

Hi Bill   I hope that you are well,   We are encountering a similar problem and would like to implement the fix that you describe, however our Meraki support agent is struggling to find that specific fix.   In fairness to Meraki, we've used dual-WAN with other Hosted telephony systems before and did not encounter this issue previously, but we now have this problem with a site using Broadsoft.   Therefore it's possible that the silent audio issue does not lie with your router in particular but the issue occurs in tandem with the SIP registration behaviour and Session Border Controller used by your carrier.   Can you please provide the Meraki case reference number where you were told that it is possible to restrict fail-over behaviour to exclude VoIP traffic specifically?   Kindest regards,   Dave @ Forever Systems ... View more