Working with Ring Support today we established that I have a good signal and good Internet access. We also established that pushing the doorbell button locally will cause the doorbell to ring and all of the Alexa devices to alert.
My question is… how is the doorbell alerted to a call for Live View from outside my network? How does it know that a session is being initiated from my phone?
Any firewall / home router will drop all unsolicited packets. Unless you have port forwarding set up. Which I do not. From sitting in my truck miles away from home and not connected to my internal network. When I initiate a Live View session I can see in my trucks display that a phone call is being set up. Also, sitting in my truck miles away from my home I know there is no way that my phone could possibly be initialing any session to anything from within my home network as I am miles away. Any call to my network from that point has to be unsolicited and would be dropped.
I suspect that when a Live View session is called from outside of one’s internal network the only way the local doorbell could know to respond would be through receiving a call on the public wireless network.
In my particular case my doorbell is not flush with the house. It is set far back away. And, we do not get very good reception with most carriers. I would say that Live View works maybe 1-2 times out of ten. So, I know it can work. It just does not work most of the time. Not enough to be usable.
Any thoughts on my theory would be greatly appreciated.