We do telephone service differently than most. We think the way we do it is better. Perhaps you’ve heard of Voice Over IP (VOIP)? Surely you’ve seen Vonage and Skype commercials, and probably even seen how cell phones can save your minutes by using available Wifi networks. But what you probably don’t know is that there are more options for phone service, including doing it yourself and becoming your own phone company with the help from a SIP Trunk provider such as Voxitas. That’s what we’ve done, and that’s why we are differerent, and that’s why we now have the ability to do complicated call routing, automated dialing, and best of all, it’s cheap.
In order to do this we had to find a provider who would hand off our IP call from our in-office open source Asterisk PBX system to the telecommunication carriers like AT&T who would them terminate the phone with an individual subscriber. The go-between that you need is a SIP trunk provider. We got lucky because our Sip trunk provider not only has largest IP telephony networks, but because they too are based in St. Louis. Which, gives us better service not just because of the shorter routing table and more direct route to the VOIP network, but also because personal service is only a couple miles from our office.
Customer Support
The most common grievance about the major telecoms like AT&T, Sprint, etc…, is that they have all outsourced their technical support. Not only does this irritate most Americans because they have a hard time understanding Indian or Chinese accented English, but also because it rubs salt in economic wounds caused by corporate greed and outsourcing. At least it does for me. This is a major reason why I chose Netlogic who has since changed their name to Voxitas. Not only can I call them and talk to my American sales rep who also happens to be the CEO of the company, I can talk to their technical support team. And for added convenience I can place a written trouble ticket.
As an example: You may have experienced times when phone calls you attempt to make don’t actually connect. They might come back with a busy tone, or else you may get a “network error.” With traditional phone company service I’ve even experienced dead lines, or dialing out that never connects– for hours.
Now, since we’re managing our own PBX switch, the problem has become much more complex, error prone and technical. Usually though, the problems we experience are caused by our own selves when we are attempting to do complicated call routing and make changes to our system. However, sometimes, we’ve experienced problems that are unexplainable when we haven’t made any changes to our configuration.
At least with Voxitas we get emails that warn us that Voxitas is making changes and improving their service and we might experience disruptions. This happened once when we were dialing 800 numbers. So, I made a call to technical support, and was quickly informed that this was a known issue and that they were working on it. Wow! I don’t think any Indian working for AT&T would have the wherewithal or technical knowledge to make that statement.
Another time we had a problem dialing out with no explanation (we kept getting 503 errors for those who are curious) I placed a trouble ticket, and not 5 minutes later got a call from a Voxitas tech who not only told me that they’d rebooted the server serving our particular SIP trunk, but also explained to me the problem that caused it and the steps they’d taken to prevent it from occurring in the future.
Maybe we are a more reasonable customer than most because we in the leading edge technology development business and have our own share of bugs, glitches, and unforeseen difficulties. Maybe your average customer doesn’t want an answer or wants to talk to foreigners whose job it is to read over a script? For us the answer is clear– we’ll take the occasional network problems as par for the course because VOIP is complicated and error prone since it’s just so new. But the benefits outweigh the problems. Especially when you can grab a beer later that day after work with that technical support rep who called you back to let you know they rebooted the server and all is well.
Thanks Voxitas!
Written By Nestor Wheelock
Systems Architect and Client Support Guru
http://www.iDotMind.com
This article be freely shared non-commercially under the Creative Commons
VOIP Is Better by iDotMind is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
