I thought I’d post a recent chat session with Vitelity. I recently did a lot of checking around to see which VOIP provider I should try - -Vitelity came up fairly often so I decided to give them a go. As I was hunting around I know I would have appreciated reading about other people’s experiences with them so I’ve decided to share my experience.
I’m using the latest distro from Trixbox that includes FreePBX 2.3.0. The issue I am having is that the “IP Trunk Registration” keeps dropping. I’m only making outgoing calls at this time, so I’m not worried about incoming. When I restart asterisk everything works fine – for a while; and then the trunk registration drops and no more outgoing calls make it.
I thought I’d contact Vitelity’s support to see if they couldn’t shed any light on the issue. After ~24 hrs I get a response that seems promising. I respond back that I need some clarification and they decide from that point to close out the ticket and that they can’t help me.
I then start a chat session with one of their reps. Admittedly I was a little ticked at this point, so I could have been a little more friendly.
shawn: I have an asterisk server using FreePBX – I went through your wizard and set everything up exactly as directed. Nothing worked. I then setup a registration in FreePBX – things started to work great after that. Now my problem is that the registration keeps dropping. Whenever it drops I can no longer dial out.
Call accepted by operator vcnmt. Currently in room: vcnmt, shawn.
vcnmt: For freepbx… go to trunk settings
vcnmt: context
vcnmt: context=from-trunk ; (this could be ext-did or from-pstn as well) Try one of the 3 and one of them will work
shawn: Why would one of those changes fix anything? I just made the change to “from-pstn”, and I know it will work for a little while because asterisk gets restarted when changes are saved and reregisters the trunk with your service.
vcnmt: its free pbx… it has issues and theres nothing we can do.
<OK, at this point I’m seeing red…such a cop out…>
shawn: Oh please – don’t give me that kind of crap answer.
shawn: If you don’t know or don’t understand just say so.
vcnmt: Is there anything else I may assist you with
?
vcnmt: I work with this same issue all day long… There is nothing we can do, the problem is not on our side, if you want more assistance with it then contact the vendor of the pbx
shawn: Do you know what you are talking about - and hence should I believe what you just told me about fixing the trunk issues or will you continue to blame the problem on freePBX. And if I decide to edit the config files directly will you then say, “Oh, its asterisk – it has issues so there is nothing we can do?”
vcnmt has left the conversation. Currently in room: shawn.
So, yes. I understand they can’t support my installation directly. There are lots of systems out there, but they do cater to this market base and in their support section they have example TrixBox configurations. I didn’t think it would be too much of a stretch to offer some technical advice.