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Provider recommendation for business

Looking for a provider recommendation.

Key items of importance.

- Call quality. Be it reinvites or servers/gateways everywhere (termination.com caught my eye) call quality is a top requirement.

- Reliability. Should have almost no history of downtime. Reliability is critical.

- DID numbers. Ideally a relatively cheap per month DID cost. I'm likely to grab a block of 10 or so.

- Work well with PBXes. Particularly, I'd like to avoid too much pain in setting up DID direct to extensions.

- LNP would be nice, but not critical

Any thoughts?

I will provide some comments relevant to this discussion, under the original points so we can have some perspective, while looking for a carrier.

- Call quality. Be it re-invites or servers/gateways everywhere call quality is a top requirement.
• A lot depends whether your ATA or IP phone has a public IP. SIP re-invites work with public IP addresses and most of the times yield much better call quality. Hop count to the PSTN gateway or SIP endpoint, not the SBC, is what makes a perceptible difference in call quality, provided we have access to quality termination.

- Reliability. Should have almost no history of downtime. Reliability is critical.
• Such expectations are unrealistic. Build your Outbound Route 2 or 3 deep. When a call fails for any reason on the first carrier, it will jump over to the 2nd and 3rd route, provided the first carrier returned the correct SIP response code. Quality carriers only charge you per minute rates, so having 2 or 3 does not cost you until you use them.

- Work well with PBXes. Particularly, I'd like to avoid too much pain in setting up DID direct to extensions.
• Initial configuration of a DID can be challenging, but depending on the country you require the DID from, there are example configurations on the forum. Alternatively you can request the service to have the DIDs setup in your account directly.

- LNP would be nice, but not critical
• LNP on DIDs outside North America is between a major pain to almost impossible, and even in North America has not been perfected yet.

One additional note which has to do with call quality, but is not directly related to any carrier, is the move from an ATA to an IP Phone. Our voice is digitized in one step, from an analog wave to RTP packets, without an intermediate step. A very crucial but often overlooked weak link, which can make a difference.

PS. Let us know to which countries you are looking for termination and DIDs, so we can offer some suggestions.

Specifcs

I'm going to make sure the phone supports re-invites. The key is I'd like a setup that provides high call quality.

The reliability is really key for the inbound routes. Can you hunt across multiple providers with a single DID? I wasn't aware that was possible, but if so, building up 2 or three providers for inbound is def the way to go. Outbound is not as big an issue as I can control that and fix problems there.

I'd be looking for DID's in North America (and NA providers).

I have a Linksys 941 on order.

I'd love to get some names for providers that people had experience with.

All the best,

- August

Clarification

August,

As far as I am aware, you cannot get a single DID from multiple providers. What I was referring to was building the OutBound Routes 2 -3 deep, not the InBound ones.

What you can inquire on from a DID provider, is their ability to send the DIDs from multiple servers, in case of an outage on one of them.

Since you are looking for N.A. DIDs my recommendation is www.les.net. It works with PBXes and the quality is very good.

Thanks Diafora,

They look good. I did try calling all 4 of their separate numbers, all of which have no answer and roll to voicemail.

I suppose the cost is low enough to try them, I just hope if I have a problem I can reach them a bit more easily then today.

I've used Les.net for a while too and their service is quite good. Try firing them an email at voip@les.net as well. Either Les or Jason respond rather quickly to my emails in the past.

Done and done.

I've signed up with them, and it looks great so far. Thank you.

- August

RE: Provider recommendation for business

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