Posts made by Skyetel

@scottalanmiller Same with VitalPBX and FusionPBX.

One of our biggest worries is that the open source VoIP community will become too consolidated. I hope that Sangoma buying Digium doesn't squeeze out the little guy - we want this community to grow and flourish and not be controlled by a few large companies.

[edit] I'm not saying Sangoma buying Digium will do that - but it is something that I worry about happening over the next decade (with more than just Asterisk)

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

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

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

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

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

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

It uses SRV records instead of A records.

One would assume that any modern OS can handle that.

We seriously do have users who still use TrixBox.

Still use is one thing. Phone systems are still very legacy mindset about lasting forever with no maintenance.

Still use = actively deploy.

Yeah, ok.. i would refuse to service them. Does that even run on CentOS 5? How woudl they even find it? All fo the old domains redirect.

I assume they've kept the ISO for years. TrixBox isn't the only legacy system people still deploy - we have ancient Avaya, Mitel, and even Toshiba systems on our network. People tend to stick with what they know and are afraid of updating their PBXs. We do our best to help, but when they are using systems that old, usually they already know that they are going to have a hard time before they even contact our support department.

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

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

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

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

It uses SRV records instead of A records.

One would assume that any modern OS can handle that.

We seriously do have users who still use TrixBox.

Still use is one thing. Phone systems are still very legacy mindset about lasting forever with no maintenance.

Still use = actively deploy. We obviously discourage this lol

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

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

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.

This is specifically a PJSIP trunk. It cannot exist prior to Asterisk 12, and wasn't normal until Asterisk 13.

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

Additionally, some people use less-than-awesome DNS solutions that either take a long time to propagate or are just providing inaccurate results.

If they are that bad, they will have other support issues anyway. You cannot fix stupid.

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

We typically recommend creating multiple trunks with our IPs

That creates its own disaster of teaching people how to route outbound calls.

We prefer "inexperienced" to "stupid"

We also do have the guide for outbound routing:
https://skyetel.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SUG/pages/16613436/FreePBX+Outbound+Routes

But I do agree - this is a more elegant implementation than what we document. Thanks for writing it

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

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

It uses SRV records instead of A records.

One would assume that any modern OS can handle that.

We seriously do have users who still use TrixBox.

@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

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.

@Curtis make sure you lower the registration timeout to something like 80 seconds. That tends to make it work better.

@Dashrender said in Relationship Pricing:

@Skyetel said in Relationship Pricing:

For clarity's sake - @scottalanmiller is correct. The "Relationship" is with NTG - so the NTG pricing applies to their customers. All Scott does is put in a ticket with the account information for his customer, and our support department handles the rest (updates the NTG customer's rates). It takes 30 seconds.

The only exception is if that customer turns out to be fraudster or randomly started calling really really expensive places or gets hacked all the time. In those cases, we'd call NTG about it since we have a Relationship and address the issue. That has never happened before though - so its not something to worry about.

Ok, so the rates are so cutrate that you're really worried about a massively different type of use client is brought on board by NTG, etc. That does make it much easier than.

The clients that NTG brings you each get their own account number and billing statements directly to themselves, right?

Correct - they use their own Credit Card, and have complete access to our portal. There is no re-billing. We just expect that support tickets come from NTG and not the customer directly.

@Dashrender said in Relationship Pricing:

Now, To @JaredBusch's point, there was some lack notification about pre setup settings - but I'm glad to hear that Skyetel has already updated their webpages to inform people of these - though frankly - I think it could be much more in your face - or during account setup, it's required that one acknowledge those setting specifically that users can/will incur charges from OR change the default to a setting where there will be no charges.

I can't imagine a customer being upset that upon setting up service they don't get those anti-spam services, etc - then upon learning then need/want them, they can go back and turn them on - and be notified of the service fee associated with those services. Charging the customer as little as possible (i.e. no extra services turned on by default) until the customer turns on costing features is definitely a more customer-centric view.

We will actually be adding it to the Port In email so that new customers know to modify their numbers prior to them going into service.

The reason those features are on by default is as follows:

1. Caller ID - When it was disabled by default, we actually got a lot of complaints from our users that "Caller ID" didn't work. (Remember not all of our users are VoIP Experts and understand how SIP Trunking works!)
2. Spam Block typically pays for itself - it reduces your inbound traffic volume by about 10% on published numbers. So the cost to have it enabled is roughly equal to the cost to leaving it disabled. In March, it blocked 10.1% of inbound calls when enabled - so its really really powerful.

For clarity's sake - @scottalanmiller is correct. The "Relationship" is with NTG - so the NTG pricing applies to their customers. All Scott does is put in a ticket with the account information for his customer, and our support department handles the rest (updates the NTG customer's rates). It takes 30 seconds.

The only exception is if that customer turns out to be fraudster or randomly started calling really really expensive places or gets hacked all the time. In those cases, we'd call NTG about it since we have a Relationship and address the issue. That has never happened before though - so its not something to worry about.

@Dashrender I created a new thread about our pricing:
https://mangolassi.it/topic/19453/relationship-pricing

So there has been a lot of discussion on this forum about our relationship pricing and I want to do my best and explain what it is, why we do it, and who can get it.

To begin, I want to explain a few first principals around how Skyetel's cost structure work.

1. Payroll is much more expensive than our carrier fees
   a. Support is much more expensive than our carrier interconnect fees & server hosting.
   b. Our Software Development team is 100% in house, on payroll and works full time for Skyetel. We do not outsource our development.
   c. LNP is also extremely expensive & time consuming

2. Our interconnect rates are not static, change constantly, and have big fluctuations by the geography of our customers calling pattern.
   a. Alaska and Hawaii are more expensive than about 20% of our international locations
   b. Toll Free calls & all outbound calls have over 190k different prices - we even try and explain it in this guide: Skyetel LCR

3. I cannot overstate how significant fraud is telecom. The last fraud event we had cost us nearly $10,000 in legal fees & required us to handle subpoenas, hand over records, and correspond with multiple federal agencies - all through expensive attorneys. (and this even was small compared to others I've seen).

Now that I've explained how our costs work, let me explain our first principals and what kind of company we want to be.

1. We prioritize customer service over everything. I'll let other ML readers jump in here if they want - but so far in April, our NPS is 95 and our ticket satisfaction is 9.75 out of 10.
2. We want our customers to have excellent rates, and to be excited about using & referring us
3. We want to a 100% clean network - no fraud, spammers or evil doers. (this is more significant than you may think - networks that cater to this group are huge and make a ton of money.)

So those are our principals - now let me explain what we are trying to do with Relationship Pricing and how it works.

1. In order to receive Relationship Pricing, you must be a technology company of some sort that offers technical services to your customer base. As part of getting Relationship Pricing, we ask that your customers, or the people you refer to us, contact you for support prior to contacting us. This allows FreePBX, FusionPBX, and other PBX experts to get their customer configured & setup, and saves us considerable support time. By saving us support time, we can offer reduced pricing; this is because the cost of support is built into our Retail Rates.

2. You cannot be a fraudulent or spammy company. We get about 3-5 contact requests per day for people who are looking for wholesale rates for spam or fraud. These groups are pretty good about hiding who they really are and what they are actually doing. We've found a common denominator between them though - they won't call us and get to know us, and when they do, they call from Skype and try and hide their identity.

3. We really do need to understand your needs. This sounds cliche, but it's legit. This is for these reasons:
   a. We need to understand your geography; are you calling Alaska, or Hawaii?
   b. Do you need significant international transit access?
   c. Are you selling significant conferencing services and need extremely high concurrency for a few numbers?
   d. Are you placing/receiving calls to Satellite phones?
   e. Do you sell services to the federal government?
   f. Do you do a lot of porting in/out or offer inventory services to other carriers
   g. etc... etc..

4. You give us feedback. This is a big deal, and is really really valuable. A lot of our customers on relationship pricing keep in touch - I talk to about a dozen of our customers per day. They give us feature ideas and help tell us what their needs are. Almost all of our features we've released in the last year are suggestions from our customer base.

So when you add all this up you find that a simple phone call allows us to get to know you, learn your a safe/trustworthy business, and tells us what our costs would be in providing service to you. We then figure out what price makes you happy, but keeps our lights on, and put you on those rates - it really is that easy.

It also lets us customize rates specific to your business or to make unique arrangements for you to serve your needs. For example - if you are located in Hawaii, you will prioritize no audio delay and pristine transit routes over rock bottom prices; so thats what we deliver. Or if you are in Alaska, you typically need high deliverability to Canada.

This is why we call it Relationship Pricing and not Wholesale

The reason we have Retail pricing is for Small Business where they need a lot of support. Situations like an owner is technologically savvy and can put FreePBX on Digital Ocean and save his business a bundle, hobbyists, home users, and developers, etc. We want those groups as customers - but because they require significant support, features and documentation, we charge those groups our Retail rates. Additionally, it was important to us that a customer could simply sign up online and try us out without committing to anything and without talking to people on the phone. About 20% of our signups happen after hours.

So the bottom line - our pricing model may be clunky, but it gives you the best of both worlds. If you are a reseller/wholesaler/MSP/nerd with friends/etc - you can just sign up online, test us out, and then call us and get more appropriate rates. If you just want phone service for your home or for your new app, you don't have to call us at all - just sign up. We have a ton of customers who spend less than $10/mo with us, and for them - calling in isn't worth it. It also protects us - we make sure our rates are fair for each customer, and it keeps our fraud very very low.

I hope that clarifies it

@JasGot said in Skyetel auto enables billable services without notice:

Looking at this from a reseller perspective......I would never do business with a company that published reseller pricing to the public. How on earth would you survive if your customers knew your costs for the products you are reselling to them? And yes, I can justify our margins, but why the hell would I want to have that battle, when it is completely unnecessary?

This is one of the top reasons why we don't publish those rates. About 80% of our customer base resells us to their own customers, and many of those end users will price compare our resellers to Flowroute, Voip.MS, BluIP, etc. We want our retail pricing to be what we would expect our resellers to charge their customers while our Relationship pricing be what we offer to those who are reselling us and/or those who provide technical support services that has end users not contacting our support team directly.

Since this issue seems to come up a lot, I am going to post a new post about our Relationship pricing in the next couple of weeks.

@scottalanmiller shhh... don't let SpiceWorks know

@scottalanmiller said in Skyetel auto enables billable services without notice:

@JasGot said in Skyetel auto enables billable services without notice:

@JaredBusch said in Skyetel auto enables billable services without notice:

aka hidden it like your pricing.

Hidden like this:
https://skyetel.com/pricing/

Well no, that's their MSRP. But they have incredible pricing that can't be discussed publicly. I mean, we ARE discussing it right now, but you know what I mean.

Go check YOUR pricing inside of your Skyetel dashboard, it's a fraction of what is on that public pricing page.

Yea - he is referring to our "Relationship Pricing" that we mention here:

@scottalanmiller said in Skyetel auto enables billable services without notice:

@IRJ said in Skyetel auto enables billable services without notice:

Can we please just nuke this whole thread? All the feedback was already taken into consideration. It's really not becoming a good look for anyone.

I think everyone is okay with that, but it's Jared's thread and would need his okay.

We're okay with it - and we apologize for any confusion we may have caused here. We updated our Port In page per @JaredBusch 's suggestions.

@scottalanmiller said in Setting up a Skyetel Trunk on FreePBX:

Don't forget to set your Codec to G722.

But always offer G711

We do our best to deliver calls over G722 and follow your preferred priority (based on what you put in your SIP), but when we can't get the call delivered over G722, we fall back to G711.

@scottalanmiller said in Skyetel auto enables billable services without notice:

@JaredBusch don't forget that you have a negative balance, you need to top that up

@JaredBusch I just threw in some free Skyetel credit for the headache