Jared, I appreciate your responding here on this forum. With that said, we run an air ambulance service and it really is unacceptable to have outages for any reason, and even more unacceptable to have no support available if and when an unacceptable outage occurrs.
Do you or any forum members know of a SIP provider that has a more commercial product?
Jared, if there is a more commercial service provided by SIPStation/Sangoma, please let me know. Five 9’s of availability with 24/7 support (especially during outages) is an industry standard for telecommunications providers. If you don’t have such an offering, you should add it. That’s what we need.
We will have to work extra hard over next few weeks and months to earn back the trust our customers put in us.
As an alternative sip trunking solution, I would strongly recommend VoIP Innovations. VoIP Innovations is a Sangoma company, they have four redundant data centers with top rate center coverage in the country and handle calls for the top UCaaS, MSP, ITSPs providers.
If you reach out to me, I will personally introduce you to the VoIP Innovations team with the hope
that we can earn your trust and your business.
Unless you agreed to different terms when signing up with Sangoma for SIPStation, these standard terms are pretty weak in my opinion and this should never have been the underlying trunk provider for an air ambulance service.
You can get a variety of opinions about good providers here but what you want to be doing is digging into the SLA terms and starting from that basis. To achieve “five nines” you’re going to have to beef up your side too. Don’t expect anyone to give you an SLA of five-nines on a single trunk over the Internet.
I would expect to want redundancy as well, including multiple services and likely analog. That said sipstation and many others including service offered by Clearly IP offers fail over options. This should go offsite usually. Ideally to a hard line or maybe a cellphone. My brother’s shop fails over to a google voice number which rings 4 peoples cell phones if needed. The more important your communications are to you, the more money you need to invest in redundancy.
Telnyx is a carrier grade SIP trunk with highly redundant servers that can failover in middle of a call without dropping it, and they got their own fiber backbone and direct connections to Amazon AWS and Microsoft azure and Google, they have 24/7 phone support and live chat without extra cost, and their prices is unbeatable for new accounts, for example I’m paying $0.0013 to $0.0024 (Tariffed Billing Per Minute Rate plan) outbound and $0.0075 inbound per-minute with unlimited channels, but provider is only half the battle your PBX infrastructure is the other half, and Telnyx has a failover option for your PBX where you can specify a secondary PBX if the first one doesn’t respond
Just in case we don’t now how many nines make a problem:-
It’s a little “pot and kettle here” can you claim “five nines” for your own system.
What Does your regulatory board require for your availability?
On the provider side Sangoma et al are apparently currently downgraded to two-nines for a year, how are you doing though?
I use several VSP’s and I don’t believe any have given me better than 4 nines in the last year. But use any two of the sub prime 9’s in the right deployment and you likely get to strut 5 feathers yourself
For what its worth, we have a sip trunk provided by Centrylink (formally MCI) that has been in place for about 2 years. In that time, we have had a 2 hr outage once…good…bad…you decide.
Doesn’t really need any decision, two hours in two years is one hour a year is four-nines.
But waiting for two hours for a life-flight is generally not a good thing Having a pissed of CEO not being able to call his mistress for two hours is possibly barely survivable.
So timing is crucial, statistically if you have two dissociated providers that give you four-nines concurrently and you can locally differentiate a working carrier from a failed one, you will likely get more than four-nines. But in reality there is no logical validity to that argument, back-hoes break most everything when badly deployed.
how would you get too providers on the inbound calls, the main problem is people knowing your public number and trying to call in your company and getting an error message, with two numbers a lot of people will still not go and look for your second number, so it seems to me the SIP trunk provider you have to find the most reliable you can get your hands on, everything else down the line you can make redundant as much as you want, or do you have another suggestion
You can’t easily, your public presence is as good as the trust you have put into your VSP provider, the reputable ones will attempt to send your inbound calls as you ask them, but they will provide a backup route for when your system becomes unavailable. Generally to a secondary SIP destination or at your extra cost, to a PSTN destination.
Again, given ONE Number (DID) , only the VSP can provide any failover but only you can manage the fallout of that failover and only if the VSP can actually successfully failover.
You know if that’s what you need then SIPStation was always the wrong choice. SIPStation, FAXStation, Sangoma and even FreePBXHosting all have standard business hours and support only during those hours
Hours of Operations
Sangoma/SIPStation support is available Monday thru Friday 8:00AM to 6:00PM Central Time for US customers and 9:00AM to 5:00PM London time for our UK customers.
Support tickets are monitored after hours for service outages and will be responded to in a timely fashion. Other issues submitted after hours will be responded to during regular business hours.
Right there the need for 24/7 support would have been not meet even before you signed up for SIPStation. The fact that SIPStation only seems to support Sangoma based stuff (outside of a Toshiba in their help docs) should indicate that its not a standard telecom service that is out there for anyone to use. They are a provider that specifically caters to FreePBX systems so people with non-FreePBX systems will generally look over SIPStation due to that. So again, this is not a service that is just for the general public.
The fact that they just bought an actual telecom aggregator (VOIP Innovations) bolsters this position. They have a Tier-2 “easy for FreePBX users” service and now they have a carrier class service for customers, like @mmoo9154, that need full-time support.
Having shilled for Sangoma for a second makes me feel cheap, to I’ll shill for Telnyx too. In fact, having a couple of incoming providers that provide fail over to your PBX sounds like a really good plan. Having each of them fail over to a second PBX also bolsters your internal processes.
Finally, there are other parts of this solution that need to be looked at, such as Session Border Controllers, which could easily allow you to get your traffic from where it isn’t going to where it should.
Mark - I think it’s time for you to upgrade. I feel your pain that it took SipStation’s failure to help you see that your old solution was vulnerable. Now that you know, let us know if you need any help.
I personally use unitel. Excellent company great support. Prices are extremely affordable. If you want some more information PM me I’ll send you my contact for them.
I thought they DID 
