Subscriber Unable to Connect Due to Network Error after a Few Seconds

Symptom

When a client on a Meraki appliance attempts to subscribe to another publisher, the subscriber sometimes successfully sees video or hears audio for a few seconds, but then the screen goes black. An error message displays that reads, "The stream was unable to connect due to a network error. Make sure your connection isn't blocked by a firewall."

Applies To

• Video API
• Meraki

Resolution

Review the specific subsets of the Meraki Peer-to-Peer (P2P) rule. See the Meraki documentation for more information.

These are the results of our in-house tests for the specific configurations:

• All P2P traffic denied - Vonage Video API subscriber failure
• BitTorrent traffic denied - Vonage Video API subscriber failure
• DC++ traffic denied - Success
• eDonkeytraffic denied - Success
• Encrypted P2P traffic denied - Vonage Video API subscriber failure
• Gnutella traffic denied - Success
• Kazaa traffic denied - Success

Cause

This is often due to an issue with Meraki appliances, which are cloud managed wireless access points. Meraki's firewall configuration has an option labeled Layer 7 Filtering, which allows for a rule called Peer-to-Peer (P2P). If the configuration is set to Deny and All under this rule, this falsely identifies subscriber video and audio connections as P2P traffic, and blocks the pings for one of the media streams. This, in turn, causes Vonage Video API's media server to assume the lack of response to its server pings to mean that the client has dropped the connection, causing Vonage to drop the media stream to the subscriber, resulting in the black screen scenario outlined from earlier.