probably a loaded question.
please tell me who you use, and for how long, and why you like them
(or tell me who you dont like)
thanks
The people that provide the bulk of the support for the forum has a service (SIPStation). I’ve never used them, but they seem to do a good job.
I used to use CallWithUs, but only for outbound. They are super cheap, and you get what you pay for. Can’t really recommend any more, but they are worth a look.
I currently use Voip Innovations and Alcarzar Networks. I’ve been with VI since before the name change before the last one. They have their share of weirdness (they had a DDOS attack on their servers at one point a couple years ago) but they’ve been pretty solid for me. One of my customer’s doesn’t like them much (they’re not very “hand holdy” and the customer needs that) but the rest of my customers are fine with them.
I started using Alcazar a few months ago and had a couple of problems with their router maintenance, but they’ve fixed that and everything is working fine now.
There are lots of others that people like. If you look back through the forums, you’ll see quite a few mentions of Twilio, but that might just be bad timing.
We are using Twilio… It comes with it’s quirks. We still have not been able to stably get Outbound TLS trunks working on Asterisk 14. However non TLS (UDP) outbound trunks works great. Inbound TLS seems to work just fine.
We picked them because of price and scalability. They do not charge for “Concurrent Calls”. They only charge per minute used (and it’s cheap https://www.twilio.com/sip-trunking/pricing ) We can have as many simultaneous calls as our connection will support. Twilio also has great trouble shooting features, carrier level forwarding, trunk fail-over, carrier level (cradle to grave) call recording and several other extras.
Twilio does not deliver anything other than calling number for CallerID. Fortunately OpenCNAM is ridiculously cheap and we cache all results for 90 days via CIDSuperFecta. For 3 medical clinics using Twilio… I think we spend about $50 a month TOTAL. We spend another $0.25c or so per month for CallerID lookups with OpenCNAM.
We also have a SIPStation trunk that is dedicated to faxing. SIPStation was one of the few providers that supported T.38 well and was reasonably prices. Unfortunately we are limited to 2 Simultaneous calls and a base price of $30.00 per month with them and then have to pay a “Per Page” fee for each fax sent/received over T.38. However, it’s still cheaper than the $81.00/m + fees/surcharges (all in $120) analog line from Frontier at that location. This line also delivers Full CID info which we cache as well.
If Twilio supported T.38, our faxing would probably cost us $5 a month or less.
In terms of developers and time invested, it feels like Twilio is a much larger machine when compared with SIPStation and many other smaller providers. The interface for SIPStation trunk management for example (on their website) has come along… but it’s still no where close to Twilio
Super easy interface for MSP’s/Resellers. Back End commissions and they handle the billing for us. Super it top notch and incredibly helpful. They have even remoted into my PBX to help me troubleshoot routing/Trunk issues. Competitive pricing.
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I use a combination of SIPSTATION for my 1-800 number trunks and GV (Motif) for extra outbound capacity
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