Shameless Plug
https://support.skyetel.com/hc/en-us/articles/360041178773-Voicemail-Transcription
We charge per VM, with no minimums or weird setups. You just use us for the PBXs SMTP server and we catch the VM in flight, transcribe it, and embed it in the email. It's one of our most popular features.
@BRRABill All your base are belong to us...
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.
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
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
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.
So those are our principals - now let me explain what we are trying to do with Relationship Pricing and how it works.
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.
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.
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..
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 
@JaredBusch said in Skyetel's Spring Update:
@Skyetel give me an API to upload my own recorded calls for transcription. Or an email to send them to. I don’t want all calls on any phone number transcribed.
Currently only a few users want voicemails transcribed.
I’m using a service (Nexiwave) for that now, where I have to email the wav file.
Edit: new features are good. Didn’t mention that.
Thanks @JaredBusch
For Voicemail Transcription, we actually offer that as a separate feature entirely:
https://skyetel.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SUG/pages/67174401/Voicemail+Transcription
You can access it here:
https://login.skyetel.com/#voicemail-transcription
(Depending on your voicemail volume, we might be cheaper than Nexiwave)
We didn't think about an email -> call transcription idea. I'll suggest it for you to our development team
@JaredBusch said in Skyetel tenant functionality:
ok @Skyetel I set this up and just made a call that should have had the X-Tenant SIP header applied.
How do I validate this in the portal? I cannot see a way to do so.
Call records show no detail. But it was this call.
We are adding this to the Tenant Management view soon. We needed more raw data so we can build it it safely. (We have to have at least a million records of anything before we start development on these kinds of features. Otherwise we risk building a solution that cannot scale). It will likely be something like "Calls tracked yesterday" and have a "Inbound" and "Outbound" view. So its coming - just needs some time
Okay - it's official. New version is out:
https://skyetel.com/postcards-1-1-now-available/
Super helpful, Thanks!
For those who are curious, our international rates and their corresponding tiers are here:
https://files.skyetel.com/SkyetelHighCostPrices.xlsx
@Dashrender said in Skyetel defenses tripped:
@Skyetel There is no Support Button on this page.
I just sent you the override code in a PM :).
Tips:
If you plan on switching to us - you can just enable our own Call Recording:
https://support.skyetel.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040711534-Call-Recording
For Comment 1 - I would suggest against the idea of a "Conference Call" recording system because that won't preserve the channels of the call. They will get muxed together and you'll loose the ability to fun things like Transcription. It can also create issues where the recorder will drop the call.
For Comment 2 - If you need to use this system for internal reasons, this would be the better option. It's better to fork the audio the recorder instead of having it record inside the live call path. If the recorder is in the live call path, and it fails, or runs out of disk, you will loose your ability to place/receive calls. (Though that may be preferred depending on the industry you are in. I know a lot of debt collectors work like this).
@JasGot said in Recording calls on a SIP Trunk to a local Recorder/Logger:
@Skyetel Is there an API or other method to automate the downloading of the recordings? Are they available through FTP or RSync?
They are available via API. Check that out here: https://api.docs.skyetel.com/
@JasGot said in Does this IP mean anything to anyone? 192.168.99.184:
@scottalanmiller said in Does this IP mean anything to anyone? 192.168.99.184:
That's a non-routable number. It's part of the private 192.168.0.0/16 range that anyone can use, but can't go out to the Internet.
I know. And that's really the basis for why I am asking. "Is it a default IP used (for some vendors) when there is no known destination?"
https://router-network.com/ip/192-168-99-184
https://forums.grandstream.com/t/issue-setting-up-new-skyetel-trunk-to-ucm-pbx/35731And here's a packet capture showing this IP as the destination for the RTP traffic (from Skyetel)
We don't use it when there is no destination, we use it to communicate with our load balances and other routing gizmos. The stuff in "line=sr-...." gibberish is the actual data that we care about, not the IP.
Its basically a way for us to securely communicate across multiple routers that are unaware of each other's existence on a call-by-call basis.
The alarm company calls when the signal gets interrupted after a period of time. Just like the would if the fire took out the router/fiber.
I strongly recommend switching your alarm and elevator phones to using SIM Cards. Most alarm companies and elevator companies offer this for a vanishingly small amount of money (like $30/yr or something tiny).
@Scott said in Intentionally Bad Hold Music:
I am looking for a post from somewhere, sometime that I can't remember about a guy who created intentionally bad hold music for pushy sales calls. The jist of it was the music was spectacularly bad, and then was doctored to be nearly unbearable to see how long the caller would stay on hold in hopes of making a sale. Then the system would hang up.
I can't for the life of me remember where I heard this. Does anyone remember this?
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4gla0x/extension_666_hell_we_are_sick_of_cold_sales/
I think you are referring to this
Hey All,
We have some really exciting news to share - today we have released an Open Source SMS & MMS GUI for the Skyetel SMS platform.
Its free, open source and you can check it out here:
https://skyetel.com/introducing-postcards/
and read our documentation here:
https://skyetel.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SUG/pages/649134085/Postcards
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 said in Introducing Postcards - Our SMS & MMS UI:
@JasGot said in Introducing Postcards - Our SMS & MMS UI:
Any updates to this app? Any plans to update it or replace it? It's still VERY VERY basic.
A couple of things I could really use are:
- Import phone numbers and names
- Send "bulk" to the people I've entered.
It's a demo app, not really meant to be used. It's meant to show how to build your own tooling using their API.
Version 1.1 is going to be released in about 2 weeks. It will include:
I wouldn't say that it is a "Demo App." We do want people to be able to use it as a solid solution, but it's not our company's focus. If you have some development expertise, you can fork it and expand on it. Otherwise you have to just wait for us to give it some TLC. We are going to try to do twice a year updates on it.
FWIW - this issue in particular was probably being caused by the ISP or the Modem, not the edgerouter. We recommended using TCP because it handles ISP NATing better and modems tend to get less confused by it.
While it could have something to do with the edgerouter, we like those routers and they tend to perform well. TCP just tends to be a catch all that fixes a lot of SIP deliverability issues.
"Potato" helps us insure people are actually reading the posting. Otherwise we just get SPAM
