[Asterisk-Users] Recommend against Teliax as primary ITSP

[Chris Coulthurst]

I really hate to have to make a post like this, but I feel I have little
choice but to relay to the group my experience with Teliax, and explain why
I recommend against using them as a primary Voip-> PSTN provider.  I hope
that a letter like this will inspire companies like Teliax to work harder at
customer service, as well as circuit stability.  We need more companies that
offer the types of service they do.

I have been using Teliax for about 3 months now, and they were my first ITSP
when I started playing with Asterisk and my Grandstream BT101.  I picked
them arbitrarily because they had low rates, and supported the IAX2
protocol, which I determined to be more firewall friendly.  Right away, I
was happy with the reponse, the online ordering, and the low rate.

It didn't take long for the multitude of outages to occur.  Now, while I
claim to be no VoIP expert, I did a variety of tests to make sure the
problems weren't on my end.  I recommended Teliax to a business partner, who
has a Linux box in a data center downtown, and had access to their system as
well.   When I'd find outages, I would first check to see if they were
having the same problem.  So far, every time I had a problem, so did they.
I am also registered with FWD on IAX2 and they were always up.   Any tech
support calls to Teliax would take more than 2 days to get a response.  Only
when I threatened to leave would someone suddenly pop up and answer my
concerns.

They claim to have been changing bandwidth providers (away from rockynet, or
at least companies that peer with Cogent), but traceroutes show they are
still with them.  So far, when I've actually gotten ahold of a tech support
person, they have told me to try different addresses for the server.
They've changed recently from voip.teliax.com to ast01.teliax.com to
voip-co1.teliax.com.  Guess what?  All the same server.  Its just more of
the same runaround.

Since the day I switched to VoIP (with Teliax) as my primary outbound
calling, more people have laughed at me for my choice of VoIP as a telco
medium than can be counted.  And these are people who respect me in the
Telco community, and who I have been trying to convince of the benefits.
They don't see the benefits when they can't call me, and I can't call them.

I understand that all companies have their problems, especially with such
emerging technology as VoIP.  I would have very little problem with Teliax,
and use a secondary provider as a backup, if they were more forthright in
explaining their problems, and notify their customer base within a
reasonable time when they are going to have outages due to network changes.
As it stands, I now have to find a new provider that will at least duplicate
the features of Teliax.

The hardest part of this is, they offer BYOD, use IAX2, and let you change
your callerid presentation.  These are all things that I MUST have.  If
anyone has some positive results with a similar competitor, I'd love to hear
about it.

In the meantime, I have to change back over to PSTN lines temporarily, since
I can't rely on service from Teliax.  I hope any/all of you that use their
service have better luck than I have with them.

Chris Coulthurst
chris at shuksan.com