@BRRABill All your base are belong to us...

@Dashrender It used to be that legacy carriers had the best uptime (back when they exclusively used TDM), but they didn't switch from TDM to SIP gracefully and still haven't gotten their act together. Every big carrier has their own quirks but they are caused by the same fundamental problem: no big CLEC is a single network, they are only single billing mechanism for multiple underlying networks. A really good example of this is CenturyLink - Depending on where you are, you could be on TW Telecom's Network, or Qwest's, or Level 3, or the OG CTL network... its practically endless. That sort of architecture worked better when everything was TDM; voltage is voltage. With SIP... man - you have protocols, packet buffers, MTUs, ISPs, etc. It's infinitely more complicated to stitch together aging disparate networks transparently. Alternatively, If you are a small legacy carrier (like Cox) you don't have the money to trash millions of dollars of TDM to replace it with millions of dollars of VoIP equipment, pay to train your employees, and get your customers on board in a time period where you don't die from the transition (this is why the little guys tend to just get bought by the big ones)

Carriers like Twilio, VoIP.MS, Skyetel (us - shameless plug!) are better at SIP because thats all we ever were - Skyetel doesn't own a single piece of TDM equipment at all, and I bet neither do Twilio or VoIP.MS. We don't have to worry about training ready-to-retire employees who are more comfortable dealing with Muxers than Jitter. This fact is actually recognized by the FCC and is part of the reason why they let carriers like us skip the whole CLEC registration process and go straight to numbering authority.

All that to say - I'd bet on our network over any Legacy Carrier every day of the week. Truthfully - I'd bet on most SIP-Only networks over legacy carriers too. But i may be biased

Hi everyone!

@Dashrender @scottalanmiller Almost all carriers are using SIP for Local Calling. Toll Free calling is the last refuge of TDM (which is one of the reasons its so expensive). If your carrier is giving your a PRI, I'd bet almost anything its pure SIP

@wrx7m I'm obviously biased - but PRIs are a complete waste of money these days. Most SIP Trunk providers are delivering just as good of service as a PRI but at a fraction of the cost. I'd put our service up against any PRI any day of the week. So long as you have a good internet connection, using a PRI is a big waste of money.

Again though... I'm pretty biased lol

SIP Registration keeps the UDP ports open only for so long (I believe the ERL defaults to 90 seconds). So long as your registrations occurs on regular intervals that are lower than the UDP timeout, your port is effectively being forwarded automatically. Some routers do this much better than others - ERLs are pretty great and we recommend them. SonicWalls are the devices that we have the biggest headache with. If you can, enable NAT timeout on the PBX and keep that frequency low - that will keep the UDP port open forever and does take care of most problems with Port Forwarding. (Though I still prefer Fort Forwarding!)

When the PBX registers to the server/carrier, it gets the public IP information from the registration request and add its it to the call routing. You have to be careful though - just because you can receive calls doesn't mean you will have audio available - those can come on different ports and from different Public IPs. Smarter routers (like the ERL) understand the context of the transmission because they understand the dual-method involved in VoIP (RTP and SIP) and can fix mistakes other routers cant.

@scottalanmiller Thanks for the phone call. I have updated our website with your suggestions.

Hi Guys,

Our pricing falls into two categories, retail (whats published on our website) and relationship (what we offer privately when you reach out). We offer our retail pricing to everyone who signs up. Relationship pricing is what it sounds like - we want to get to know you and extend you pricing that suits what your needs are. You do not have to be a reseller or wholesaler, but those groups are typically who we deal with most (which is why we call them out directly on the website).

The reason we don't match/compete with other published pricing is because we are not trying to build a business full of customers who we don't know. We want to know you, know your needs, and give you white-glove service. We're not trying to do a cattle call. Relationship based pricing allows us to make sure that when technical issues arise, you have the resources to get help (whether thats from us or from a third party). Users who simply sign up on our website tend to not have that, and thus, require more support hours. We also have a lot of home users who use us for their personal home phone (my grandparents included!). For them, our retail pricing is only costing them $2-$4/mo and so they don't get a huge benefit of wholesale prices.

So with that in mind, the way we work with MSPs is we negotiate pricing with the MSP directly, and then that confidential pricing applies to all of their customers. This is true for all our referral partners - whether you sell IT services, PBXs, or ice cream.

I hope this clears everything up

Chris

@Harrygill I think we may have gotten our wires crossed. We told you that our published pricing would already save you about 1/3 of your phone bill and guaranteed you that if your phone bill was not reduced, we would adjust your pricing accordingly.

Additionally, you were also given $50 in free Skyetel credit to test us out.

As mentioned previously, we do not compete on published rates - only rates you are currently paying.

@scottalanmiller here's our international pricing: https://files.skyetel.com/SkyetelHighCostPrices.xlsx. This is on our pricing page, but its a link, so its easy to miss

We have some pretty awesome fraud protection with our international system - give this a read:
https://skyetel.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SUG/pages/243761174/High+Cost+Calling