SureWest SIP Trunking - Setup

Has anyone ever used SureWest in Sacarmanto or in Kansas City area? I am bit worried now that I am switching to them since I can’t get a straight answer from them on what you need to plug in to the trunk settings. When I try to explain it to them it’s like another language to. I used CBeyond, NexVortex, and VoIP Innovations and all of them give you the basic config file settings you to need to get their service working. With Surewest they sent me this document. Here is how it looks.

SureWest Communication
SIP Ethernet Handoff Service
SIP Trunking

Thanks for choosing SureWest Communication SIP Trunking Ethernet Handoff Service. We appreciate your business. Below find some information that will help you set up your service.

  1. During the installation process the SureWest Technician should have marked a RJ45 jack for SIP voice service. This is where voice services need to be connected for IP routing and Quality of Service considerations to the SureWest Voice network.

  2. SureWest should have supplied a voice IP address, as well as its associated Subnet Mask, and Gateway IP address, in a welcome letter. This IP address is where SureWest is going send voice traffic to.

  3. Customers can provision this IP address in a couple of ways. Customers can put this IP Address directly on their SIP enabled PBX. For customers that want to keep their private networks intact, the IP address can be provisioned on an interface on their router or firewall and perform some sort of static Network Address Translation, back to the actual IP address of their SIP enabled PBX.

  4. The Customer needs to send their Voice traffic to SureWest’s Session Boarder Controller. The IP address for this device is 172.21.248.10. Once customer’s network is set up in one of the above prescribed methods The SBC IP address should be pingable to test connectivity.

If setting up SureWest provided IP address on Router or Firewall, the SBC IP address 172.21.248.10 as well as 172.21.248.11, need to be allowed through the customers Firewall or Access list.

  1. SureWest requires no SIP registration for SIP Trunking service. SureWest will route all the valid voice traffic sent to the Session Boarder Controller by our customers.

  2. The customer needs to provision their PBX so that it does not use the P-Asserted Identity field, as this field overwrites the fields SureWest uses for billing and security and will fail the calls. Listed below are some additional provisioning considerations as well.

• SureWest expects and sends 11 digits for Northern American Dialing.
• Customers should send an 11 digit calling party number.
• All International calls should be prefixed with 011.
• At this time SureWest only supports UDP SIP traffic, no TCP.
• RFC 2833 should be turned off.
• SureWest only Supports G711u CODEC at this time

Any help would be great. They can’t even tell me if they support Asterisk servers.

Did you start? Did you connect server to RJ45 as specified and see if you could ping their SBC?

I am sure that Asterisk/FreePBX will work fine.

1

They haven’t hooked it up yet, but I am not sure what to put in the trunk settings. The problem is I kind of need to work right away when it goes live since they will be porting at the sametime. PLus I will be in Chicago trying to tell someone what to do in Sacramento. I love remote install.

If you are under that type of time constraint you should consider hiring a consultant that can assist in the turn up.

Make sure they have experience with many carriers and Asterisk.

I am waiting for Surewest to give me some choices in this matter, but they haven’t responded with any compies that can help me out. I find this kind of strange they haven’t gave me any yet. I never had a provider not offer a list of local vendors that setup their service. I am really not under a time contraint I just know they want to port then numbers at the same time.

This is kind of funny I now E-mail the people handling the order and they are all out on vaction to next week. Plus Surewest wants to install and turn up in a week…

Phone company is not going to have a list of Asterisk vendors. There might not be any in your area.

Anyway, there is no need for an Asterisk engineer to be onsite. I have turned up 100’s of trunks remotely around the world.

Telco’s are also a pain at this time of the year, you need to keep a tight rein on them.

1 - Install and test the IP connectivity, once this is in a minimum of 1 week of uptime before I would run voice across it.

2 - Turn up SIP trunk and make sure you can originate traffic

3 - Port numbers

These tasks need to occur sequentially. You can’t try and do them concurrent or skip steps.

I do have a company going out there to help with the install. He hasn’t used Asterisk before. I found out from SureWest that out of the 300 SIP customers 11 use asterisk. I am trying to contact one of them to get the trunk settings to save on time trying to figure it all out. SureWest is only a regional provider so the pickings are more slim on people using them.

Here is what one enginerr from SureWest gave to help with the trunk settings…

  1. Codec: only g.711u
  2. Outgoing calls from customer to the outside network we prefer 11 digits (1NPANXXXXXX)
  3. Incoming calls to customer, the SIP INVITE messages should be sending down to their PBX as +1NPANXXXXXX
  4. DTMF mode: depends on their phone system, they might have to turn off RFC2833 because when the caller is connected to a phone tree or auto attendant, the phone system could not detect the DTMF tone (digit pressed).

Plus the IP the calls are being handed off from. That is it on help from them…