[Asterisk-biz] A big problem with some resellers of resellers

[Paul]

Just noticed I have the timings reversed in my original post. X(the 
upstream provider) is the faster one. Also should mention that X, when 
pressed, admitted that the DID number I bought from Y was the same 
product I was now buying directly. For inbound and outbound everything 
does go to X's server but  in one case it goes through Y's server along 
the way. The difference in call quality is obvious since both DID's go 
to the same context on my * test server.

Buying voip services that get passed through a chain of resellers 
servers is sort of like buying cocaine that got stepped on too many 
times, isn't it?

Paul wrote:

> This is not exactly rocket science:
>
> I opened an account with Y who buys from X. I later figured that out 
> so I opened an account directly with X.
>
> Typical pinging and tracing looks like this:
>
> to Mister X 78 ms 15 hops
> to Mister Y 26 ms 11 hops
>
> Since then I have done lots of host, ping, traceroute and whois 
> commands on ALL current and potential providers. I have at least one 
> case where the promotional website, the customer login website, the 
> mail exchanger and all gateway hosts resolve to the same IP address. I 
> know that I often config customer routers to NAT different ports of 
> one public IP to multiple servers. I hope that is the case here. 
> Otherwise it could be a case of everything crammed into one server. 
> Here I am considering moving lots of things like web and email away 
> from the connection where I do voip testing/development(nothing 
> customers are paying for) and find that I can't even count on some 
> providers to have that much common sense!
>
> My opinion of people like that(the gentle/kind version) is "Very far 
> from ready for primetime"