How about I make this easy: Use 43717 for the promo code and any member of this forum will get free port ins for the next 30 days <3

Hey Guys,

We’re going to be reviewing this first thing on Monday. @JaredBusch had a strong argument about Microsoft in his email.

I can say that we will be removing the 1 cell phone number per account limit and allowing a certain number of new accounts per month instead (so you can create 5 or so accounts per month before our system stops you). We’re also going to be reviewing the credit card idea but that may take more time.

I’ll update you all once we have a new policy in place and it’s deployed.

Hi All

We have decided to introduce SIP Registration support in a forthcoming update on Skyetel. Our goal it to roll it out in Mid-Late November, but it may come sooner or later than that depending on our testing period. I am posting this because I would like to see if anyone here is interested in acting as a beta tester for us when its further along in development.

While it is in Beta, there will be some limitations:

1. International Calling will not be supported
2. You will be limited to 30 concurrent calls on our network (15 per SIP Region - more on that later)
3. You will be limited to 1 call per second

Our SIP Registration deployment will support 2/4 regions - NW and NE. Your PBX will need to be configured to register to both regions and we will round robin from our regions to support multi-region redundancy. If we do decide to roll it out to all 4, your PBX would need to register to 4 regions in the config (which would be a pita to configure).

It is our intention to still strongly encourage the use of IP Authorization instead of SIP Registration. So we will probably have a few limitations for SIP Registration that do not exist with IP Auth. We also will not support connecting a desk phone or ATA directly to our network, even though technically it will be possible to do so.

A few things we're still thinking about:

1. We have not decided yet if we want to add registration to all 4 of our regions, or only support it in two.
2. We have not decided if we want to include SIP Registration in our SLA or leave it as a "Best effort" service. (TBH, I'm leaning toward including it in the SLA)
3. We have not decided on the Registration timeouts - some carriers enforce a full 1800 seconds and won't let you re-register faster than that. We're leaning toward a 6 minute Registration timeout, and providing guidance that you should re-register every 5 mins.
4. We are worried about fraud risk with SIP Registration. Since it is possible to get your carrier credentials compromised on an old PBX, it becomes possible for a Skyetel account to be compromised itself, rather than through a PBX. So we're thinking about having different balance requirements, or different verification methods, etc. We may also block SIP Registration on old PBXs (please people, stop using Trixbox for the love of god).

I'm interested in your gentle (cough Jared cough :stuck_out_tongue: ) feedback. What have you guys had experience with, what suggestions or ideas do you have?

Hey Guys,

Behold our new sign up page!

From the feedback here, we made the following changes:

1. You can now re-use your mobile number on 5 new accounts per month (so go nuts @JaredBusch )
2. The new field "Direct Contact Number" serves as the direct phone number for the customer; this is the number we call if there is a fraud event or a porting emergency. (so please make it a real phone number)
3. We made it prettier :)

Thanks for everyone's feedback - feel free to take it out for a spin!

@Skyetel said in Skyetel needs to get over 11 digit numbers:

@JaredBusch said in Skyetel needs to get over 11 digit numbers:

FFS I cannot do a damned thing in their system without issues with fucking 11 digit numbers..

Today it was opening a support ticket.

1. Yes, I intentionally did not put the 1 in there. I knew that it would probably bitch.
2. Point 1 is not important though, as I do not have a DID that comes to me. That DID goes to an IVR. So I have to put an extension in there. But no, you can only ever use an 11 digit number on anything you ever do in the Skyetel portal.
3. Aside form the extension issue, like my point about the tenant contact info, the contact info for the person they need to call need not be a US based person. Just because I am working with a US based carrier on a US based number does not mean that I have to buy a US based number for you to call me when I am in Tokyo or London or WTF ever.

@Skyetel Have you all never thought about anything like this at all? Seriously?

Okay. You're right. We're over it.

Now you can use 10 digits so long as the first digit does not start with 1 <3

... and you can add extensions into the support ticket request form :D

Signups will do the same tomorrow.

It is a Cloudflare outage, and it impacts about 30% of the internet. Details here: https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/

@scottalanmiller said in Skyetel is a scam:

I think that the situation here is that Jared has discovered a fringe use case that just isn't foreseen and was overlooked (and is eleven cents so no one has thought about it before.) No one is scamming over eleven cents, that's ridiculous, and if any of us posted this, Jared would be the first to tear into us.

Should those services be mentioned somewhere so that in this bizarre edge case there is a warning that you might lose a few cents for services you didn't check? Sure, I'll bite and say that that might make sense to have it somewhere so that people aren't surprised on an edge case like that by a few cents that they had not anticipated or to know to look to go turn it off in case they aren't going to want it.

But what needs to be understood is that this is a port of active numbers. Porting an active number that you don't want to use is really odd. Nothing wrong with doing that, just totally bizarre. If you don't care about the number why bother porting it? Because this is so weird, I think it has fallen through the cracks of simply being a use case no one anticipated. I certainly would not think of it, the nature of porting a number creates the assumption (which is almost always correct) that you also plan to use it. Otherwise we'd expect that you'd get a new, immediate number rather than doing an "expensive" port.

But jumping from "someone made a mistake and didn't anticipate that anyone wouldn't want this situation because everyone else probably does, I know I do" to "it's a giant scam trying to get my eleven cents" is a crazy leap that just doesn't add up.

@scottalanmiller this edge case was never really considered. We'll be adding the following to our port in page ASAP:

• Once your number finishes porting, usage and feature costs will begin billing immediately
• Caller ID Lookups & Spam Prevention is enabled by default.`

@JaredBusch said in Skyetel needs to get over 11 digit numbers:

FFS I cannot do a damned thing in their system without issues with fucking 11 digit numbers..

Today it was opening a support ticket.

1. Yes, I intentionally did not put the 1 in there. I knew that it would probably bitch.
2. Point 1 is not important though, as I do not have a DID that comes to me. That DID goes to an IVR. So I have to put an extension in there. But no, you can only ever use an 11 digit number on anything you ever do in the Skyetel portal.
3. Aside form the extension issue, like my point about the tenant contact info, the contact info for the person they need to call need not be a US based person. Just because I am working with a US based carrier on a US based number does not mean that I have to buy a US based number for you to call me when I am in Tokyo or London or WTF ever.

@Skyetel Have you all never thought about anything like this at all? Seriously?

Okay. You're right. We're over it.

Now you can use 10 digits so long as the first digit does not start with 1 <3

... and you can add extensions into the support ticket request form :D

Hey Guys,

We released this feature a little while ago, but just did a very small update that automatically turns on fraud alerting for all accounts. For those interested, please have a look at this: https://skyetel.atlassian.net/wiki/x/AYA4KQ

The original announcement can be found here:
https://skyetel.com/introducing-fraud-alerts/

We want you to be safe out there <3

Since @JaredBusch has been kind enough to teach everyone about our Tenant feature, I figured I'd give you guys a preview of this before anyone else - but here's a pre-alpha version of the Tenant Portal. Its still getting love by our front end team, but this is what the dashboard will more or less look like:

@jaredbusch great meeting you too! That picture came out much more "crazy eyes" than I was going for!

More Details:
https://support.skyetel.com/hc/en-us/articles/4402279765911

Hey Guys

We're looking for two or three beta testers to help us test our new Postcards for Slack:

When you connect Postcards to your Slack, it will create a new channel with your Skyetel DID:

Inbound SMS messages will automatically create a new SMS Thread with the source phone number, and any replies inside that thread will send a reply to the cell phone:

(Please note that in the production release version, it will say "Postcards" and not "Skyetel SMS")

I am looking for 2 or 3 Beta testers who are able to give this a good test and report back on what they find. To be a part of the Beta, you will need to send me credentials to a Slack account that can install an App in your Slack Workspace (the authentication is not live yet, and needs to be done by an engineer). You can create a dummy account for just this purpose.

Who is interested in helping?

Here's a preview:

It's still in development, but we're really excited about it.

Hm.

A carrier should quitely build an integration with Slack and Microsoft Teams that lets them send & receive SMS/MMS using their company numbers, and then surprise everyone with it as a replacement to an open source project. It would be so cool if you could create a channel for each company number (which you can make private to certain people), then each conversation with someone by SMS would create a thread. It would even be cooler if someone made that whole thing free.

That would be awesome...

@JaredBusch We are intentionally being vague on this because the technical stuff on the backend isn't solid yet. We may be able to attest those calls depending on the circumstances. So the vagueness is simply because the product is still in motion.

@JaredBusch Ah, same rules apply though.

If the DID is not a Skyetel DID, and you did not specify a DID you want us to Attest at Level A, then it will be attested to at Level B or C depending on who the Skyetel customer is. We can't attest phone numbers that are not specifically enumerated and verified either by it being on our network or via a manual attestation process.

You will have to enumerate what numbers you want us to attest at a Level A. Otherwise, forwarded cell phone numbers will be attested at a Level B or C depending on our relationship with the customer.

Hey Guys

We just (quietly) released support for Faxing via ATAs. We are releasing this in Beta and making it known to our technical friends so they can trial it. If you have any ATAs and are interested in trying this out - check it out: https://support.skyetel.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500003980502-SkyeFax-Beta-

SkyeFax is in Beta - so don't judge us too harshly :)

Would you guys give this a whirl? I'd like to get some of your feedback.

We just published this on our status page, but here's what happened:

From approximately 7:45am to 8:45am PST, we were impacted by a routing issue with one of our carrier partners. This caused inbound phone calls to fail before hitting the Skyetel network, and resulted in callers greeted with error tones.

One of the pillars of the Skyetel architecture is our redundant routing, and many of our customer's have asked why it failed today. We do our best to be transparent, and so here’s what happened.

As part of our interconnection agreements with our carrier partners, we require multiple redundant connections from physically separate networks that automatically redirect call flows from an unhealthy region to a healthy one on a call-by-call basis. Ordinarily, this would mean that if a carrier partner was having an issue in one of their data centers, Skyetel's traffic would be automatically shifted into a different data center instantly.

Unfortunately, the routing table that we established with our partner that dictates how calls should be routed was mistakenly deleted by an authorized member of our carrier partner's team. This prevented our routing tables from being followed and resulted in the call failures observed this morning. As soon as this routing table was reestablished, we were able to reenable our call routing and service was immediately restored.

We have been, and will continue to be, in talks at the highest level with our carrier partner about how this happened, and what safeguards are available to prevent this from happening again. Skyetel’s President is addressing this personally, and all options are on the table. He’s, uh, pretty upset.

It’s is important to note that we do not use this carrier partner for a lot of Skyetel's transit. As such, only 7-8% of our DIDs were impacted. Furthermore, no outbound calling or other features were impacted by this.

We know that issues like this are frustrating and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.