[Asterisk-biz] Recommendations on incoming US TollFree IAX service?

[Scott Laird]

On Oct 27, 2004, at 10:33 AM, Scott Bussinger wrote:

> I'm looking for recommendations for US tollfree service termination 
> into an
> Asterisk server via IAX. I've been googling reading the wiki and have 
> found
> a few providers, but not much in the way of reviews or solid 
> information. I
> need multiple simultaneous calls coming in. Volume is around 2000 
> min/mo
> total. I'll also need to know what happens to calls if our internet
> connectivity is down for either a short time or extended period.
>
> Several companies mention 800 numbers in passing but have no real 
> details
> about them. So far the only good looking options I've found are 
> nufone.net
> and iax.cc. Does anyone have any good/bad experiences with them? Surely
> there must be some others as well -- can anyone suggest people they've
> worked with?

I've been using NuFone for over six months.  Their service has been 
rock-solid for me--I've never seen an outage.  Their pricing is pretty 
good --$0.02/minute for 800 calls is quite a bit cheaper then a lot of 
the other alternatives that I've seen, particularly since they don't 
charge a monthly charge for numbers or have any sort of minimum usage.  
I've had multiple simultaneous incoming calls from them without a 
problem.  You can have them forward incoming calls to a PSTN number if 
they lose touch with your IAX server, but I've never actually tested 
it.

Their one shortcoming is their support system--it's wildly 
unpredictable.  Sometimes it takes 5 minutes to get an emailed 
response, other times it takes weeks.  They claim that they've been 
making improvements, and my last few encounters with their support 
department have been quite a bit better, but it's hard to tell if 
that's just luck.  The only trick that I've learned is to watch for the 
automated reply from their email system--if you don't get a response 
with a ticket ID within a couple minutes, then send another message.


Scott