[mikaelbj]

Hi,

we have deployed 20 Nokia E51s in a hotel environment roaming between 45 Cisco access points in the hotel. The phones are used for internal communication with SIP, and are a crucial part of the daily tasks in the hotel.

The phones work fine when they have coverage and have not been outside of an uncovered area, like staircases or elevators, but after the phones reenter an area with coverage after being disconnected they often have problems reconnecting and end up without a SIP registration.The bottom line is that the phone cannot be called and cannot place calls until it is reconnected. The reconnection either happens in a few minutes, a few hours or not until restarted, which is a big problem. The phones are using the latest firmware.

The phones are configured to scan for wireless networks every minute as well as connect automatically to the SSID used in the hotel. I have tried to play a bit with Advanced Settings in Wireless LAN, but have not encountered any settings related to this matter.

Has anyone else used these phones in similar environments? What are your experiences? Are there any settings I can tweak? Do other Nokia phones work better?

[rdinsf]

I started a thread last week with a similar problem with E63s:

/discussions/board/message?board.id=communicators&thread.id=43736

Registration with SIP is stable once registered, but registration is hit and miss.  What works for me as a work-around, which I don't think is practical in your situation, is to go into the SIP settings, manually change the access point to one that is not available, and then change it back to the proper access point.  This will cause the phone to register.

But, we shouldn't be having this problem.

[rdinsf]

I no longer have the problem I described in response to the original post. 

Two things seem to have made the difference.

First, I have the WLAN scanning on.  It will automtically SIP register when it sees a previoulsy defined access point.

Second, under SIP settings, the "Registration" setting is set to "always on."

It's possible the original poster may have done both of these things, and it didn't work, but that is what has worked for me.

[zzigge]

Did you ever get this working reliably? I'm having the same problem with a E52. Nokia support told me that the sip client is more or less a technology preview, not intended for production use. The Nokia N900 and Pirelli DP-10 both work as expected. The pirelli might need a reboot a month or so, the N900 seems rocksolid. This is with sipgate in number of different wifi nets.

[mikaelbj]

I have been in contact with product managers at Nokia who claim that the bug has been fixed in  the latest FW versions for the E66 and E71. I have sent an E66 to our customer and I'm waiting for more info about how it works. I tested it a bit in our own network and it showed a lot better results than the E51s we were using. I was also told that the E51 will not receive any fix for this problem, but the E52 will. E72 will also get it soon.

[Hans_V]

Hello, I have about 200 E51's in service also with the SIP client, and the same issue with me, the phones connect to the wlan, register on the SIP gateway, once they go ouot of coverage , then they reconnect to the wlan, register to the sip, but when I make a call to these sets, they don't react, but when I make a call it uses the SIP and they are perfect reachable (until they go out of coverage again).

We also had the same issue with E71's but this seems to be solved with the latest firmware, can anybody if I can expect a new firmware which can resolve this issue on the E51 (as on the E71) ?

[mikaelbj]

I suggest you contact a Nokia rep. I was not able to get a clear answer on whether they will release a fix for E51, but I was told that it is not prioritized because it's an end-of-life product.

[zzigge]

E52 firmware 031.012 seems to have improved the situation considerably. I'm still testing, but so far wifi reconnecting seems to work just as well as on the N900. I created a new "Network Destination" sip and set the sip profile to use this. It now seems to reconnect reliably when in range of a wifi AP.

What still doesn't work properly is when adding the UMTS connection for sip use as well. The initial handover to umts when leaving wifi coverage seems to be ok, but after loss of umts coverage (train ride) the sip client doesn't seem to reregister, not even when in wifi range.