I am currently with bandwidth but we have had a lot of minor issues within the last 6 months that we have not had for years. I am looking into other providers to see if they work more reliably with our system. I wanted to get some suggestions , when I do a search I get a lot of biased advice.
Right now I am thinking about sipstation but I wanted to see what other people use.
… and you’re hoping that you won’t get that here? LOL…
For me, the usual suspects include “SipStation” (Sangoma’s ITSP), VOIP Innovations, and Alcazar Network. I use the last two and recommend all three (I like free software that stays free).
I am very biased here but one of the best ways to support FreePBX is to use our service like SIPStation. You also get the added bonus of 1 kneck to choke in support for your system and we have great support staff. Not to mention some great features in SIPStation with FreePBX that nobody else has.
Thank you very much. i am looking at all three. Sipstation does sound like a good place to start.
Before jumping ship, are you reasonably certain that your issues are caused by Bandwidth? Switching providers entails some risk (porting snafus, instability while settings are finalized, etc.) and expense. And if the trouble turns out to be with your setup, network or ISP, the new provider won’t work any better.
If your problems are limited to outbound calls, I recommend that you keep your numbers with Bandwidth for a month or two, while you thoroughly test one or more prospective VoSPs for outgoing.
Can you please provide some details about the issues you’ve been having?
While this is a big advantage, note that leaving Bandwidth likely means that you’ll be dealing with a VoSP that is dependent on a separate carrier for your DIDs, so you could be adding opportunities for finger-pointing. (This is much less of an issue for toll-free; if your chosen provider is a resporg, switching carriers is painless and can be done instantly.)
Will SIP Station be coming to the UK soon?
I like the points you put forward for using SIPStation (and agree with them) with FreePBX but at first glance it does look expensive if you need multiple simultaneous calls.
Do you have any plans to lower the price the more “trunks” we purchase?
With my current provider it costs roughly ÂŁ70-90 and I get 4 SIP trunks with a shared pool of 17 concurrent calls. It looks like it would cost ÂŁ300+ (424.83 dollars) if I was to use SIPStation based on the current pricing.
I’m going to echo the previous question a bit. What is the issue that you are having and are you 100% sure it’s a Bandwidth issue. However, you asked for an unbiased opinion so here it is.
First, many places like VoIP Innovations, Vitelity, ThinQ, etc use Bandwidth for their services. They use them for origination and termination services.So if you are having a problem with something on the Bandwidth network, nothing is to say you won’t experience it when you switch to another provider who maybe offering your services via Bandwidth. You just won’t know it’s Bandwidth causing the issue.
Second, comparing Bandwidth and even the other providers mentioned above to SIPStation is an apples to oranges comparison. Why? Here’s why. Bandwidth and the others don’t really care how many active calls you have going for the most part. Some start to impose “concurrent call” limits but not until about 50 or so channels. As well you are paying per minute for those calls. With SIPStation they offer unlimited usage channels that support one call each at $24.99/month. So now if your office generally is doing 6 calls at a time that means you now need 6 channels from SIPStation (6 x $24.99 = $149.94/month) not including the costs of the DID (which is pretty on par with the rest for local services). Now if you have a Toll Free, you are also paying $0.024/minute with SIPStation versus the rough average of like $0.018/minute for the other providers mentioned.
So before you jump ship or take a suggestion someone gave you in a forum (or anywhere) you should first find out what the issue is that you are having. If it is solvable and if it really is a Bandwidth issue. Because I’ve been using Bandwidth for years, they handle 90% of my voice traffic and I have yet to experience any issues with them in the last 6 months that would make me consider leaving them. To be honest, I haven’t had any issues with Bandwidth in the last six months at all.
We are planning to get a trunk and number to see if we have the same issues with a new provider. I am looking to test first. I am not switching unless I was 100 percent sure it makes a big difference. It would be a major change to completely switch.
Bandwidth acts like the problem is on their side. We have not done any changes to our system other than updates. We have had a few issues but it is a small percentage and we can not intentionally reproduce them which makes it very hard to troubleshoot. We have some outbound calls that do not ring , they are just dead air then if you wait it connects. It acts like we are not getting a ring code from bandwidth. We also have some calls that the person we are calling can not hear us. If we call back it works fine. There were some other issues that they fixed like outbound calls to a bad number bouncing to our queue.
It is a small percentage of calls. We make a couple thousand calls a day. This is only around 5 to 20 calls a day. The problem is we have restrictions on how many times we can call a number. If the employee can not make the call it effects their paycheck and the company income. We had no issues for years, it is a recent thing but the employees are getting angry. Part of the solution is to test with another company, if the same thing happens it is us, if not it is them.
OK, so as far as the “Ring Back” goes Asterisk can do something about that. I haven’t had any reports of this issue but without seeing a debug of the call with the SIP packets, can’t say what is happening. However, do not be confused by the SIP reply of “180 Ringing” because that doesn’t actually mean Ringing in the sense of “we’re sending ring back tones” it means “We are calling the destination”.
As for having issues with no outbound audio on calls but then having it when you make the call again, that is also going to require some debugs because it could be the media server in question being used. You would have to see if media IPs are the same in the calls or different.
As I said, I use these guys for 95-ish% of my outbound traffic. I do a couple thousand calls a day as well but across 100’s of end users/clients. If this was an issue I would hear about it. I hear about things like “I called this number got a busy and then tried with my cell and got through” and when I look at the call logs, the number did return a 486 Busy on their attempt which meant the line was actually busy.
Just out of curiosity what is the bandwidth you have for this up/down (mainly up) and how many outbound (or inbound) calls do you have going at a single time?
We have 100MBs up and down. Generally no more than 10 calls at once. We used to have twice the number with less bandwidth.
We us 1-VOIP. paying $200 a month for 26 DIDs. And they authenticate through IP not credentials
I find authentication through IP is a pain. if your IP changes, you can have interruptions.
Depending on your call pattern, have you looked at metered providers? I’ve been very satidfied with voip.ms. Had it installed in a number of businesses. As a bonus, they will connect to your FreePBX through IAX2, taking some of the firewall goofiness with SIP out of the equation.
We have a Static IP
Flowroute
My 2 cents. I use Telnyx.com with Freepbx. I haven’t had any issue their tech support couldn’t fix (or tell me how to fix when it was in freepbx settings). They also support virtual machines in AWS with MPLS circuits which uses the private network between the PBX and the SIP server. I have an unlimited number of trunks and I just pay either a flat fee or per minute. I have found it to be very economical to pay per minute (.007 min, a lot less for on-net calls). I have 80 numbers (DID) on the service and pay $80- a month for the phone numbers and about $30 a month for all the minutes on the 80 numbers (on 80 phones). I don’t use the AWS but I do use Cyberyink (also a virtual server, less expensive than AWS plus they have virtual freePBX servers <$50/mo that include sysadmin pro and endpoint manager in the build image! Takes 5 minutes to setup a PBX server, 1st month free. I am trying to convince them to add MPLS to telnyx for even better service.
Yeah, for the record MPLS isn’t something that you just “switch on”. It would require Cyberlink to make major changes to their overall networking layout and work with Telnyx directly for this to happen. I wouldn’t hold my breath on it.
As a whole yes. But they already said if I installed my own MPLS network they would add it as a virtual connection on my VPS. Its not really that complicated (add a link and a few static routes and all traffic destined for Telnyx wold use the MPLS link
We use SipStation. 35 DIDs (1 tollfree), 3 Trunks, and use concurrency bursting.
Our bill is right around $130 a month - it varies up and down a little depending on how much concurrency bursting we consume, but on occasion we’ll see it get up to 15-20 calls simultaneously on the trunks. We do fax over the trunks in and out, and usually have no problems. Our last bill says we had 3,900 incoming min and 3400 outgoing with 84 inbound conc events and 46 outbound conc events.
They had a little spat a few months ago where once a month for three months in a row there was a service outage where the trunks wouldn’t register. Each event lasted around 1-4hrs. Nobody answered the phones at sipstation support the 2nd and 3rd times, but they did respond to the tickets I put in around 30 min acknowledging the outage but with no ETAs for repair.
I was a little worried that it was a trend since we had really just started moving over to them in January but have not had any issues since those three months.
TBH, we came from Earthlink where 40ish lines were $2400 a month and our T1 went down for an entire week with no even acknowledgement that it was unacceptable, so a few hours over a few months (2 of 3 were afterhours) really didn’t hit us too bad. So for a $25,000 something savings a year, we can deal with a little downtime. (We also added like 40 more phones since then and consolidated some locations to our PBX)
I went with Sipstation. No issues so far. It did 99% of the installation automatically. I put an employee on it today. Going to let them use it a few days and compare.