[Asterisk-Users] Who's happy with their voip service?

[Andre Normandin]

I've had Broadvoice for over a year now, and although their outages are
really annoying, the fact that their service costs $20/month unlimited is
what keeps me with them..

I have 2 Inbound #'s through them (same account), one in GA (678-253) and
one in CT (203-935), and overall their inbound has been more reliable than
their outbound (minus the past week or so)..

I have my dialplan try BV first, and then if it cannot use BV for outbound,
it rolls to my pots line(s).. It actually works really well, except that if
BV goes completely toes up Asterisk decides that it doesn't want to do
anything either :-(

That is what I find the most annoying, quite frankly, BV is having Growing
pains (in my opinion), and I can accept that, haven't put anything critical
on my BV inbound, and 90% of the time BV outbound works fine.. The rest of
the time, the pots take care of outbound, and anyone who calls me calls on
my pots lines (except for family in GA, which is why I have the GA #).

For me personally, I just think VOIP is 'too' early in the maturity curve to
really rely on it as a provider.. It's great in-house (medium/large
companies), but for service, I think pots are the way to have rock solid
service for the time being.

I know of two of my friends that have Vonage as their only inbound numbers
(not via asterisk, via the vonage locked adapters, so it is completely
vonange), and their service also has issues at times.. Granted, I'm not sure
if it's a true vonage issue, or their internet connection, but nonetheless,
there are still issues..

If I could get Asterisk so it just work continue 'working' properly with
whatever SIP connections it can reach, I'd be a happy man..  Don't get me
wrong, I think Broadvoice needs to communicate better with their customer
base, and the latest ongoing outage is, to say the least, very frustrating,
but I am willing to cut them some slack because I think VOIP is still in
it's infancy, and broadvoice is the only BYOD provider I know that will give
unlimited for $20.00/month..

 - Andre

-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com]On Behalf Of Johnathan
Corgan
Sent: Saturday, May 07, 2005 12:58 AM
To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
Subject: Re: [Asterisk-Users] Who's happy with their voip service?


JD wrote:

> Inbound
> calling has been down for 2 days.

Just FYI, mine is back up (408-903) as of about five hours ago.

I did just speak with a (Broadvoice) support tech on an entirely
unrelated matter (40 min. hold time!), mentioned mine was working, and
he seemed to think things were coming back in stages.

I've had them for two months now.  People may recall a series of emails
regarding packet loss through their PNAP link to Sprintlink (my ex-ISP
backbone.)  I ditched the Sprint BBD fixed-wireless service, got
Sonic.net DSL, and have been enjoying pretty high quality voice service
since.  The packet loss rates at PNAP still show but I think now this
shows it's an artificial measure (intentionally dropped non-VOIP
packets, all the other potential reasons hashed about in that thread.)

In spite of the service outages and long hold times for support, I still
want to give them the benefit of the doubt (and my $25 monthly.)  It
still seems like growing pains vs. incompetency.

I tried their web interface to change DIDs, as they now have them in my
home area code.  The effect was instant, I reconfigured sip.conf with
the new number and secret they provide, and something like 3 minutes
later was using the new DID.  So some things do work well.

Wish they did IAX. And ILBC. Not that important to me right now, though.

-Johnathan
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