If there is one thing this whole VoIP.ms experience has taught me - it is how to identify trucks and airplanes.
Is a bus a truck? I have spent a lot of time contemplating that question while waiting for my endpoints to registerā¦
It looks like VoIP.ms has finally rounded the corner and the wonders of Magic Transit and Anycast are working their magic.
I have one non-profit customer that almost lost a lot of funding because their phones didnāt ring and another who maintains hotlines for domestic violence victims that I worked so hard to make sure those calls went SOMEWHERE.
Iām hoping for a quite weekend.
Next week - we build a better solution.
Solve Problems - Move Forward.
But seriously - is a bus a truck? Can anyone answer THAT question?
Iāve not been selecting them and they let me into the site. To some degree, I think weāre the new botnet. Weāre having to switch servers frequently so everyone is logging in to make changes multiple times a week/day.
I just setup an account with telnyx as a backup. Itās not as nice for the PBX setup but looks like it will work for now.
I may need to build my own PBX one day in the future, but I like the phone carrier taking that off my plate of responsibly. Iām NOT an IT guy, just enjoy playing with it.
Telnyx offers a $10 credit, so itās a free backup for now.
I only have it setup for outbound calls now, and it worked. Passes my business caller ID number so thatās great.
If voip.ms doesnāt get it figured out over the weekend, Iām going to have to switch (temporarily). I do see the value in voip.ms and wish them the best!
Note to anyone switching, I had to set the outbound proxy to their sip address. I didnāt have that set before with voip.ms
I wanted to make sure I could use telnyx if I did port to them.
For now, they are the 3rd account on my phone system. 1 and 2 go to voip.ms and plan to stay with voip.ms after they get back to full operations.
Thanks Tom and others too
VoIP.ms is handling calls fine since 14:00 CDT yesterday.
Bandwidth.com is now suffering major outage! Glad I rode out the storm with VoIP.ms nowā¦Screenshot_20210925-163802|230x500
Yeah, bandwidth is VoIPmsās main upstream provider. Many many providers are using Bandwidth, including Google Voice.
We have been using twilio as a backup. Prices are on par (for elastic sip) as voip.ms. The logging is a lot better, too, but the interface for billing customers is not something Iāve played with a lot. What I do like is the proactive notifications I get for my trunks. Their āinsightsā are also good. Itās a little humorous, but one of my clients had a misconfigured IVR. They noticed that the same call was calling but hanging up after about 45 seconds. The client called the number and realized their error. They had only been watching the logs so they could make sure calls from VOIP.ms were being actively forwarded.
I wonder if tiād be good to have a separate āsupportā thread where we post the lessons-learned with different voip providers and how to configure them with FreePBX. Iāve got the info for twilio if anyone needs it.
Here is the video covering mitigation methods for dealing with VoiP outages, some porting discussion, and also why itās a good idea to be using a toll free number that I did with Ray from https://oit.co/
This video was done before the current issues with https://status.bandwidth.com/
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bandwidth.com is under major attack for the third day nowā¦Itās having large national effects, see https://twitter.com/search?q=phone%20outages&f=live
Might have to look at 800 number service for rapid routing of DIDs
That was an interesting snippet from Ray Orsini about toll-free numbers being routable to multiple carriers. Iām not sure how or if that can be implemented in the way you and I would need it to be. Bandwidth claims ā5X carrier redundancyā on Toll-free numbers - but that still lands back at a single account with BW. I am doubtful I could have a toll-free number on both a Bandwidth account and a Flowroute account, for example.
TFN can be re-routed quickly. That only addresses part of the problem here. The other part is that 40% of the US service providers use Bandwidth is some way. That means their outbound calls will not reach you even if you are reachable. For those thinking about porting to alternate carriers they need to consider the above.
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Just to clarify - from a downstream - or midstream - perspective - I donāt believe I can tell Bandwidth to re-route my TFN to Intrado/West/Flowroute and expect they would be able to do that within a couple of hours. Would you agree with that?
Sorry - I should have led with - thank you, Ray. I really appreciate your willingness to share with the community.
My pleasure. And no, you cannot ask BW to re-route your TFN. You would have to have an account with another TFN provider like Intrado/West or similar to do so.
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So, I have accounts with Bandwidth and Flowroute (Intrado/West) - and a TFN on Bandwidth - you are saying that I should be able to re-route that TFN from Bandwidth to Flowroute easily?
Hi Rey, thanks to you and Tom for the great video.
Wow. I did imagine that they are that bigā¦ Curious, where do you take this stats from?
Regarding the TFN, if I have an account with two providers, can the secondary provider perform the āswitchā, or only the primary?
yes, you could port that to Flowroute easily. Should be same day
On your end you will port it out like any other number. You will request the port from the winning carrier. That stats come from a service provider group I manage.
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Thank you very much, Ray!
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Well, knock on wood, but as of today I have all phones registering with 3 of the newly-hardened (ārecommendedā) voip.ms POPs (Recommended servers - VoIP.ms Wiki) and my customers using these pops seem to be stable for both incoming and outgoing calls.
I realize this may be temporary and things could get worse (especially given the current attack on bandwidth.com) but at least thatās some improvement even if intermittent. (Maybe the attackerās bots are all focused on bandwidth.com now as voip.ms is not paying the extortion?)
Thanks Tom and Ray for your super-informative videos and posts.
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