FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...
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@BraswellJay said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
Are these companies profitable with little chance of disappearing?
Yes. You are worrying about "what ifs" that aren't really reasonable, and ignoring a small, but vastly more common every day risk.
It's like worrying about sharks and not about bathtubs. In the real world, sharks sound scary when you talk about them, and bathtubs sound safe. But a bathtub is way, way more likely to actually hurt you.
You have to be really, really careful when doing "what if" risk that zero emotions come into play. A phone carrier might sound risky, and it has shark-like risks. But your ISP is a bathtub risk... it hurts people all the time.
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@BraswellJay said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
I know centurylink isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
That's not the real concern. It's CL deciding to stop a service you need or sells it to someone or just doens't need to fix yours. Yo ushould be 100x more concerned with them "going away for you" than a phone carrier whose whole business depends on making that one product work. CL could drop you without blinking, voip.ms cannot.
The very concern you mention, should have the opposite risk. I've seen CL drop products, so does MS and other big players. Looking at it from a "will they go out of business" perspecitve gives a meaningless result, that's not the outcome you should be concerned with.
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@BraswellJay said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
That's another concern I have about moving to them, porting our numbers to a provider such as voip.ms and then having them disappear with no good way for us to get our numbers to another carrier. How much of a risk do you see in that area?
This isn't a real world risk. Could it happen? Sure. But CenturyLink would be every bit as risky there... which is to say that neither is even worth discussing. Both are big, stable players that aren't totally evaporating.
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I would verify with your CenturyLink rep that you are actually buying SIP services on CenturyLink's network. I would be very surprised if that was indeed the case, as most of CTL's network is TDM. You are probably buying off of Level 3's SIP network, but dealing with CenturyLink's customer service. In that circumstance, the amount of finger pointing would be much much worse than buying Internet from one place and SIP services from another - at least in that case, the finger pointing is visible to you and you can make judgement calls. When the finger pointing is hidden from you, you just end up with issues that you can't solve and can't get any support on.
Also if you do decide to go the route of us (yay!) or voip.ms, or whomever, you can easily track the call quality of the internet with voipspear.com (we offer this for free - but voipspear.com is excellent and cheap). This pinpoints the problems immediately... no finger pointing and no BS.
The only other piece of advice I can offer is that there are federal rules that require telecom companies to provide customer's the ability to port their numbers away in the case of them going out of business in order to prevent an outage. The FCC does not want subscribers loosing access to 911 because a carrier had hid their losses until the last minute (we have to disclose financials to the FCC quarterly). Most companies (us included) have built-in contingency plans that provide for serious financial distress by being sold to or merged with a competitor. This is true of any registered carrier (voip.ms, us, flowroute, etc etc). So the worse case scenario is a stressful port - just make sure you go with someone reputable.
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@Skyetel said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
I would verify with your CenturyLink rep that you are actually buying SIP services on CenturyLink's network. I would be very surprised if that was indeed the case, as most of CTL's network is TDM. You are probably buying off of Level 3's SIP network, but dealing with CenturyLink's customer service. In that circumstance, the amount of finger pointing would be much much worse than buying Internet from one place and SIP services from another - at least in that case, the finger pointing is visible to you and you can make judgement calls. When the finger pointing is hidden from you, you just end up with issues that you can't solve and can't get any support on.
Good point, the worst of all worlds there.
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Awesome screen cap
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@Skyetel said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
@scottalanmiller said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
Awesome screen cap
Awesome beard.
It's a bit wild due to being away from a trimmer for like two months. I cannot wait to get back home to my scissors and stuff, lol.
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@BraswellJay said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
@Dashrender said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
How will Centurylink's SIP be delivered? is it actually just an IP you point to?
Yes, it is IP based. We already have fiber service from Centurylink and that would be the interface.
Cox Communication for example is nothing like getting service from VOIP.ms. Cox must deliver service via a cable they run to my location. This is a requirement of theirs. This means I can't effectively use a hosted VPS solution like Vultr with Cox. It also means, even if I did have an onsite PBX, if my building burns down... I can't just spin up another PBX in another location - I'm stuck waiting for Cox to deliver service to whatever new location I get up and running - when they get to it.
What I mean is - can you connect to Centurylink SIP via any ISP you want? or only via Centurylink's ISP?
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@scottalanmiller said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
If voip.ms tried something similar, first of all they would go out of business and would make no sense as they are not an ISP and have no benefit to this like your ISP does, but also it would be straight up illegal and you'd sue the crap out of them.
With an ISP, you can't prove intent, even though we all know that they bank on it and use it constantly to make you afraid to switch services, and you know that you are agreeing to the risk up front, so you have zero recourse.
So in one case, they have no real ability to do it, and no reason to do it. In the other they have every ability to do it, and every reason to want to.
See how they are as different as can reasonably be?
This is only the case if the two services are linked in any fashion what so ever.
i.e., the OP can't use another ISP to access Centurylink's SIP. Which as of my current reading - hasn't been confirmed.Now Cox for example - you're absolutely right - they can definitely hose you - though it's still different. Cox provides a completely separate connection for SIP than they do internet - at least with regards to coax. On fiber - they would deliver via the same physical plant, but I'm suspecting that there would be a completely unique channel on that fiber just for VOIP traffic. I know there is different router equipment just for the SIP traffic I'm getting from Cox, versus the internet traffic I was getting from Cox all via that fiber connection.
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@scottalanmiller said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
You have to be really, really careful when doing "what if" risk that zero emotions come into play. A phone carrier might sound risky, and it has shark-like risks. But your ISP is a bathtub risk... it hurts people all the time.
What makes a phone carrier so much less risky than an ISP.
They both deliver last mile service to their customers - where, granted, most of the problems occur.
Back when I used to have traditional copper based phone, it almost never went down. Ever since getting cable modems, the outages by comparison to copper phone connections have increased dramatically! - why is that? Are networks at that scale just inherently unstable? more difficult to keep equipment running? more prone to environmental failures, etc, etc, etc?
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@Dashrender said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
What makes a phone carrier so much less risky than an ISP.
Watch the video. Physical infrastructure is out of the vendor's control and is always at high risk, always. Servers are low risk, they are easily protected. It's just system failure rates. Phone carriers have very little equipment that is easy to make redundant. ISPs rely on many moving parts that are highly exposed and often impossible to make redundant. Result: phone systems are vastly more available than ISP resources, even though ISPs spend billions and the phone carriers spend thousands.
It's like asking which is more likely to experience a failure... a filing cabinet or the national highway infrastructure.
Everyone uses filing cabinets and most people never see one fail. People driving on the highway experience construction or accidents every few weeks of driving (or more.) Has nothing to do with cost, it's about complexity. There is no way to build a highway that fails less than a basic filing cabinet, it's just not feasible.
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@Dashrender said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
They both deliver last mile service to their customers - where, granted, most of the problems occur.
No, they do not. One IS last mile, the other is not in the slightest last mile but is a datacenter service. Totally different things.
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@Dashrender said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
Back when I used to have traditional copper based phone, it almost never went down.
Everyone says this, but back in the POTS era, I knew all kinds of outages, some going for years that the phone companies could not fix. That POTS "always worked" is one of those rose coloured glasses myths. Back then, we never said things never failed, now looking back suddenly we do.
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@Dashrender said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
the outages by comparison to copper phone connections have increased dramatically! - why is that? Are networks at that scale just inherently unstable? more difficult to keep equipment running? more prone to environmental failures, etc, etc, etc?
This is because you've changed your definition of an outage. In the old days, you accepted "any signal on th eline" as "up", today if the signal isn't absolutely pristine, you consider it "down". Because it used to be analogue audio, not digital data. The lines today carries literally tens of thousands times the data than they used to, at thousands of times the quality. If all you wanted to was to "make sound" over the lines, today's lines are way more reliable.
QUality has gone up, but not as fast as customer expectations.
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@scottalanmiller said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
@Dashrender said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
They both deliver last mile service to their customers - where, granted, most of the problems occur.
No, they do not. One IS last mile, the other is not in the slightest last mile but is a datacenter service. Totally different things.
Centurylink was a phone carrier LONG before they were an ISP... they definitely provided last mile.
Granted, the advent of SIP allowed a divorce between physical infrastructure and the phone carrier, but that means you're looking only at businesses that have moved to that model... and granted, most old school carriers/ISPs have not.
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@scottalanmiller said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
@Dashrender said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
Back when I used to have traditional copper based phone, it almost never went down.
Everyone says this, but back in the POTS era, I knew all kinds of outages, some going for years that the phone companies could not fix. That POTS "always worked" is one of those rose coloured glasses myths. Back then, we never said things never failed, now looking back suddenly we do.
Clearly the infrastructure where you worked and lived and experienced had these kinds of issues in spades, many of us elsewhere have never experienced the problems you speak about - months longs outages, etc. I'm not saying they don't happen, I'm sure in crappy parts of whatever they certainly do happen, they just aren't universal.
The video was great though - I do appreciate how you broke out the last mile companies versus the services that can, and often do, live in a DC. Though I think you should redo your video and use "last mile provider" not phone carrier versus ISP. CenturyLink/AT&T/Verizon, etc are all carriers AND ISPs it's only the last mile issue that generates all the risk you're speaking of. The novices watching all of the Professor videos could easily be confused by you not allowing for CenturyLink to be a phone carrier - which they clearly are - and how they started life, but expanding to say 'last mile provider' would clearly show the line you're talking about.
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@Dashrender said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
Centurylink was a phone carrier LONG before they were an ISP... they definitely provided last mile.
No, you are STILL talking about the ISP portion. You aren't understanding the difference between the phone service and the physical infrastructure. They were still two different things long ago.
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@Dashrender said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:
Granted, the advent of SIP allowed a divorce between physical infrastructure and the phone carrier, but that means you're looking only at businesses that have moved to that model... and granted, most old school carriers/ISPs have not.
Yes, they have. All have, long ago. They just bundle it and hope you don't realize it, which is working. CenturyLink's phone service and ISP are two totally separate things under the hood.
