Best posts made by Skyetel

Super helpful - thanks @JaredBusch

We typically recommend creating multiple trunks with our IPs so that you don't rely on DNS. In older versions of Asterisk (we still have users who use 1.4!), DNS would cause Asterisk to crash. Additionally, some people use less-than-awesome DNS solutions that either take a long time to propagate or are just providing inaccurate results.

That being said, if you are feeling ambitious and want to try an unpublished (but supported) technique, you can use srv.skyetel.com instead of term.skyetel.com. It uses SRV records instead of A records. We keep this unpublished to encourage people to use our IPs - SRV causes a lot of problems for inexperienced administrators, but some PBXs require it when using multiple IPs like we do.

@DustinB3403 said in Setting up a Skyetel SIP trunk in FreePBX:

@Skyetel said in Setting up a Skyetel SIP trunk in FreePBX:

Super helpful - thanks @JaredBusch

We typically recommend creating multiple trunks with our IPs so that you don't rely on DNS. In older versions of Asterisk (we still have users who use 1.4!), DNS would cause Asterisk to crash. Additionally, some people use less-than-awesome DNS solutions that either take a long time to propagate or are just providing inaccurate results.

That being said, if you are feeling ambitious and want to try an unpublished (but supported) technique, you can use srv.skyetel.com instead of term.skyetel.com. It uses SRV records instead of A records. We keep this unpublished to encourage people to use our IPs - SRV causes a lot of problems for inexperienced administrators, but some PBXs require it when using multiple IPs like we do.

It's not unpublished now. . .

shhhh... don't tell anyone

It's not a state secret, it's just not encouraged. We don't publish it in our docs, but it is supported. ML is mostly experts who understand the downsides of DNS & SRV + they don't use TrixBox

@JaredBusch said in Exploring VitalPBX:

@Skyetel said in Exploring VitalPBX:

We're very fond of VitalPBX. Take this with a grain of salt - but VitalPBX generates a very low number of support requests when compared to other PBXs. We tend to view that as a good indicator of how well the system works and how easy it is to administer.

Grain of salt indeed. How are you calculating that? This is a solution with a tiny fraction of the current market. Low number of requests are easily just because there are fewer people installing it. Also because it is typically the more technical people trialing things, they also need less help.

We calculate it per capita to account for the imbalance. We don't have a ton of VitalPBXs on our network, but enough to have an opinion. Its not hard science, hence the "grain of salt," but we do keep up with what systems work better than others. (Its a big part of how our relationship pricing works)

@Skyetel said in Exploring VitalPBX:

@JaredBusch said in Exploring VitalPBX:

@Skyetel said in Exploring VitalPBX:

We're very fond of VitalPBX. Take this with a grain of salt - but VitalPBX generates a very low number of support requests when compared to other PBXs. We tend to view that as a good indicator of how well the system works and how easy it is to administer.

Grain of salt indeed. How are you calculating that? This is a solution with a tiny fraction of the current market. Low number of requests are easily just because there are fewer people installing it. Also because it is typically the more technical people trialing things, they also need less help.

We calculate it per capita to account for the imbalance. We don't have a ton of VitalPBXs on our network, but enough to have an opinion. Its not hard science, hence the "grain of salt," but we do keep up with what systems work better than others. (Its a big part of how our relationship pricing works)

I should add - VitalPBX might surprise you with how popular it is. It's also growing really really fast. Vital is definitely well beyond a "tiny fraction." They're just not a major player... yet.

@Dashrender said in FreePBX hardening ...:

@scottalanmiller said in FreePBX hardening ...:

@marcinozga said in FreePBX hardening ...:

@IRJ The scenario described above doesn't look like automated attack, and it's rather unlikely bots would be exploiting PBX to make international calls.

Actually that's exactly what is done. Bots setting up calls.

I'm curious - to what end? what's the benefit to them?

Typically bots will call international Toll Free numbers where fraudsters can charge insanely high per-min rates. Toll Fraud (its official name) can be insanely expensive (like $100k phone bill expensive). We are pretty insane with our fraud prevention to avoid this.

Edit - we describe the kinds of fraud we've seen here: https://skyetel.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SUG/pages/243761174/High+Cost+Calling
It also describes how our fraud prevention works.

Another really common type of Fraud is actually Inbound. Some companies will actually pay people to deliver calls to Toll Free numbers. (This is because Toll Free carriers give kickbacks to the parties who send calls to them). This makes it so that if a party calls a Toll Free number, they'll get a (very very small) per-min kickback. If they call enough Toll Free numbers and keep them on the line for a long time, they can make a lot of money.

So if you have any Toll Free numbers, make sure they go to an IVR or a Voicemail box that has a timeout :).

This is a good resource too:
https://apeiron.io/lrn

@JaredBusch said in I guess Skyetel doesn't want business:

At this point @Skyetel, I am back to your company being nothing but a waste of time.

You do not respect business in any way.

I'm sorry you feel that way but I wish you the best of luck with other providers

@travisdh1 said in Block Spam callers:

@Curtis said in Block Spam callers:

I have been testing @Skyetel and it seems like this is a great option for dealing with SPAM calls.

@skytel I'm curious, which Spamblock Bot do you use?

It's our own Lenny server that we host for this purpose - its hilarious

• Provider stability : Is there any reason to be concerned over the stability of voip.ms or any of the other providers that get discussed frequently (Twilio, Flowroute, Skytel, Vitelity, others? ). Would they be considered big enough that even if they did run into financial issues that they would likely be taken over by someone with bigger pockets who could keep them running?

• 911 : Plan to discuss with them info primarily from the voip.ms wiki here : https://wiki.voip.ms/article/E911

• No internet - no phones : this is an issue in that we don't have redundancy on our network link, but there has not been any network outage since the fiber was installed at this particular site several years ago. Not sure what I can do on this short of say we could keep a POTS line or two for emergencies but that of course starts to eat into the cost savings some also.

Are there other objections that anyone has heard when making this transition?

I'm obviously biased, but I can make some suggestions about this :).

1. Stability - Most of the providers you listed have a good record of uptime. Most will likely be as good as or better than any TDM carrier that delivers you service over a PRI or Copper lines. This is especially true as many TDM carriers and Cable companies are already using SIP on the backend and just delivering you the last leg over TDM. For financial stability - there are laws around how utility companies have to go out of business gracefully. It would be a pain (you would have to port your numbers to a new provider in a hurry), but you have to be given notice by law.

2. E911 is super important. You can read how we do it here. Just make sure whatever provider you use allows 933 for test 911 calls. That way you can test it once a year or so to make sure something weird didn't break.

3. If you have fiber, you are probably fine. Some of the carriers you listed (including us) allow you to failover inbound calls to cell phones if your PBX goes offline.

If you office views calls as super critical, I'd suggest setting up VoipSpear to measure the QOS of your call. If you do decide to give us a try, we offer that for free.

I hope thats helpful

@Pete-S said in Discussing with management switching to VOIP ...:

@Skyetel said in Discussing with management switching to VOIP ...:

@Pete-S said in Discussing with management switching to VOIP ...:

@BraswellJay said in Discussing with management switching to VOIP ...:

• No internet - no phones : this is an issue in that we don't have redundancy on our network link, but there has not been any network outage since the fiber was installed at this particular site several years ago. Not sure what I can do on this short of say we could keep a POTS line or two for emergencies but that of course starts to eat into the cost savings some also.

Maybe you can setup a 4G link as redundancy instead. Voip traffic doesn't require that much bandwidth so even if you only get 2 Megabit/s or something it is still plenty.

I would suggest against this - a lot of the 4G carriers do crazy things with NAT that SIP Trunks really really do not like. We run into CGN problems all the time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT. It also can create issues with UDP Fragmentation.

But if you are using a hosted PBX is that really an issue?

You can mitigate it somewhat, but yea, its still an issue. The best way to get around it with a hosted PBX is to use a VPN between the phone and the PBX. That will bypass most of the NAT issues and keep the phones routing the way they should. You can still get dropped calls though.

@Dashrender said in New PBX - on prem or off?:

https://www.hellosign.com/legal/hellofax-security

they don't claim HIPAA compliance.. so while they are likely OK, we wouldn't use them.

I'd suggest checking out http://mfax.io. They are HIPAA complaint https://www.mfax.io/hipaa-compliant-fax and we get feedback all the time from our customers about how great they are.

@JaredBusch said in I guess Skyetel doesn't want business:

I'll be calling

@JaredBusch and I just emailed about this. Should be fixed within a few hours - it's an edge case that is related to the payment method.

@JaredBusch said in I guess Skyetel doesn't want business:

I think this is the same as before? So I assume the number port in process is what was updated for that process.

Yes, this is the same as before.

@Dashrender said in I guess Skyetel doesn't want business:

@Skyetel said in I guess Skyetel doesn't want business:

@Dashrender said in I guess Skyetel doesn't want business:

@DustinB3403 said in I guess Skyetel doesn't want business:

@JaredBusch said in I guess Skyetel doesn't want business:

I never, ever, enter a 1 for anything.
All dial plans are built to use 10 digit dialing or look for the 011 prefix for international.
I didn't pull this out of my ass. It is based on how cell phones have operated for the last 30 years.

I'm not saying you're pulling anything out of anything, nor how it's not uncommon to not need the 1 or 011.

I'm asking how is it not intuitive? You deal with calling plans 24/7 among other things, and thus it's unintuitive for you. Many other people wouldn't see this as an issue at all.

I agree with JB in this case - if you are going to demand the 1, then you should tell us that you want 11 digits in that field. I would never put it in there either - again, as JB mentioned, you haven't needed a 1 on a cellphone in 20'ish years.

Well we can just remove the 1 requirement and/or add it for you. Our network routes on 11 digits by default, and all of our numbers are displayed in our portal as 11 digits, so we tried to stay consistent.

That part is totally fine. But many people, obviously JB and I, are accustomed to only entering 10 digits - so having the system auto handle or, as JB originally said, just put a note above the field saying - requires 11 digits - would be a nice improvement.

Okay - good thinking. I'll add it to our next update for it then

We're working really hard on Tenants right now, so it may take a few weeks before we incorporate this suggestion.

@JaredBusch said in When does a port-in number show up in the Skyetel portal:

@Skyetel said in When does a port-in number show up in the Skyetel portal:

We delay adding them because once they are added in our Inventory they route instantly on our network, and on our interconnecting peer's networks. To stay compliant with PSTN standards, we don't want to do that until we have FOC

This is why I like to setup routing in the provider portal as soon as I set up the number.

See if you begin to route the number immediately after putting it in a place I can access, that means I will immediately being to miss calls from anyone using Skyetel to call me.

Because I have not yet routed the number to point to any of my Endpoints.

Yes, calls from other carriers will still go to the existing provider, until the port completes. But for anyone else using Skyetel, the call will never leave your network and attempt to route to me potentially before I am ready.

We go back and forth on this, but settled on this method because about 25% of our LNP orders occur before a PBX has even been spun up. Many integrators want to get the port started, and then install & configure the PBX on the FOC date.

For future reference, you can actually ask our LNP team to route the phone numbers to a particular endpoint group in the Port Notes for you.

@JaredBusch said in Exploring VitalPBX:

@Romo said in Exploring VitalPBX:

@rcuadra Is there a time frame of when the endpoint manager will be working with PJSIP extensions?

It would even be better if they quit using SIP as the default on port 5060. Asterisk gave up CHAN_SIP years ago.

RIP chan_sip

@scottalanmiller said in FreePBX with Centurylink IQ SIP ...:

Awesome screen cap

Awesome beard.

@scottalanmiller said in Best SIP VoIP Softphone for macOS:

Got a couple of users on macOS that would like to set up a softphone on their desktops. In theory Linphone, Zoiper, X-Lite make macOS versions. Anyone have a reason to pick one or the other or have another option on macOS?

I use Telephone on my laptop and like it. Its pretty sparse, but it works well and is efficient.

@JasGot said in SIP Trunks and Directory Assistance:

If you are moving your phone lines to a SIP provider, where do you turn for a directory assistance listing?

I know there are services, but with ATT and Comcast (for example), they do it for you. How does it work with a SIP provider?

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

We tried offering this about a year ago and just gave up.