@Dashrender said in I guess Skyetel doesn't want business:

@Obsolesce said in I guess Skyetel doesn't want business:

@Skyetel said in I guess Skyetel doesn't want business:

@Dashrender said in I guess Skyetel doesn't want business:

That's all fine and dandy.. but I can't sign my company up (I'm the IT Admin here) because I'm not giving you my personal cellphone for a company sign up.

Other systems have done setups that get through IVRs to internal extensions - that's what would be needed in my office.

Requiring SMS for business is seemingly absurd.

We don't require it as a means for contacting you - we never use it - its just for the signup process to verify you are a human and to prevent duplicate accounts. On the next step under "Organization Info" it will ask you for the contact information to use.

Why not a credit card like all the real businesses?

Now I could get behind that.

We already do require a CC for signup

• Provider stability : Is there any reason to be concerned over the stability of voip.ms or any of the other providers that get discussed frequently (Twilio, Flowroute, Skytel, Vitelity, others? ). Would they be considered big enough that even if they did run into financial issues that they would likely be taken over by someone with bigger pockets who could keep them running?

• 911 : Plan to discuss with them info primarily from the voip.ms wiki here : https://wiki.voip.ms/article/E911

• No internet - no phones : this is an issue in that we don't have redundancy on our network link, but there has not been any network outage since the fiber was installed at this particular site several years ago. Not sure what I can do on this short of say we could keep a POTS line or two for emergencies but that of course starts to eat into the cost savings some also.

Are there other objections that anyone has heard when making this transition?

I'm obviously biased, but I can make some suggestions about this :).

1. Stability - Most of the providers you listed have a good record of uptime. Most will likely be as good as or better than any TDM carrier that delivers you service over a PRI or Copper lines. This is especially true as many TDM carriers and Cable companies are already using SIP on the backend and just delivering you the last leg over TDM. For financial stability - there are laws around how utility companies have to go out of business gracefully. It would be a pain (you would have to port your numbers to a new provider in a hurry), but you have to be given notice by law.

2. E911 is super important. You can read how we do it here. Just make sure whatever provider you use allows 933 for test 911 calls. That way you can test it once a year or so to make sure something weird didn't break.

3. If you have fiber, you are probably fine. Some of the carriers you listed (including us) allow you to failover inbound calls to cell phones if your PBX goes offline.

If you office views calls as super critical, I'd suggest setting up VoipSpear to measure the QOS of your call. If you do decide to give us a try, we offer that for free.

I hope thats helpful

@Pete-S said in Discussing with management switching to VOIP ...:

@BraswellJay said in Discussing with management switching to VOIP ...:

• No internet - no phones : this is an issue in that we don't have redundancy on our network link, but there has not been any network outage since the fiber was installed at this particular site several years ago. Not sure what I can do on this short of say we could keep a POTS line or two for emergencies but that of course starts to eat into the cost savings some also.

Maybe you can setup a 4G link as redundancy instead. Voip traffic doesn't require that much bandwidth so even if you only get 2 Megabit/s or something it is still plenty.

I would suggest against this - a lot of the 4G carriers do crazy things with NAT that SIP Trunks really really do not like. We run into CGN problems all the time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT. It also can create issues with UDP Fragmentation.

@Curtis said in Block Spam callers:

Youtube Video

The very same!

@travisdh1 said in Block Spam callers:

@Curtis said in Block Spam callers:

I have been testing @Skyetel and it seems like this is a great option for dealing with SPAM calls.

@skytel I'm curious, which Spamblock Bot do you use?

It's our own Lenny server that we host for this purpose - its hilarious

@JaredBusch said in I guess Skyetel doesn't want business:

At this point @Skyetel, I am back to your company being nothing but a waste of time.

You do not respect business in any way.

I'm sorry you feel that way but I wish you the best of luck with other providers

@JaredBusch said in I guess Skyetel doesn't want business:

@Skyetel said in I guess Skyetel doesn't want business:

@JaredBusch said in I guess Skyetel doesn't want business:

@Skyetel said in I guess Skyetel doesn't want business:

The ideal situation is to have the end user create their own account and have the IT team administer it. You don't have to share an account - you can create a new account for the IT Administrator and he can administer it directly without sharing credentials. (Thats what @scottalanmiller does)

There is no menu, that I can find, to create a sub account on my account to enable someone else to log in and administrate my account.

Shoot in a support ticket and they create them for you along with a temporary password.

Part of this?
https://skyetel.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SUG/pages/664141827/Tenants+Invite+Only+Alpha

Tenants is being designed for use cases such as this and is under active development. It will also include a Tenant Portal where end users can view their assets (like phone numbers or call recordings or faxes) without being able to make changes or with different permissions from the Administrator.

@JaredBusch said in I guess Skyetel doesn't want business:

@Skyetel said in I guess Skyetel doesn't want business:

The ideal situation is to have the end user create their own account and have the IT team administer it. You don't have to share an account - you can create a new account for the IT Administrator and he can administer it directly without sharing credentials. (Thats what @scottalanmiller does)

There is no menu, that I can find, to create a sub account on my account to enable someone else to log in and administrate my account.

Shoot in a support ticket and they create them for you along with a temporary password.

@DustinB3403 said in I guess Skyetel doesn't want business:

@Dashrender said in I guess Skyetel doesn't want business:

Apparently that a SMS was sent to Bob.

Except it's only used for account creation and not verification of account changes/charges/etc/etc/etc

@Skyetel said in I guess Skyetel doesn't want business:

The SMS thing is not used for future correspondence and we don't call it or use it ever again.

Correct - we don't use it for authentication or correspondence. It's strictly used for account creation.

When we do introduce 2FA, we'll use Google Authenticator

@black3dynamite said in I guess Skyetel doesn't want business:

Just for kicks, I tried using my Google Voice number and it failed.

It isn't 100% accurate, but its close enough to be effective

@Dashrender said in I guess Skyetel doesn't want business:

@Skyetel said in I guess Skyetel doesn't want business:

@Dashrender said in I guess Skyetel doesn't want business:

I appreciate that you are trying to setup real, not fake accounts, please consider changing to email for confirmation instead of SMS.

I had a similar issue with Google the other day. It continues to amaze me at the amount of assumptions we run into in systems these days.

On a side note - My EHR system fully expects that every patient will have their own email address - once we ran into this issue, we started seeing how many couples share a single email address between them. It's crazy, like 2% of people share a single account, this means we run into this issue about once a month.

The problem with other forms of identify verification is that it's not unique to the individual and it is not personally identifying. You can create new emails, you can create new phone numbers to call, etc. The cell phone is unique because its extremely uncommon for people to have more than one. Additionally, the system verifies that the number you specify is indeed a cell phone number prior to sending you the verification SMS.

We're not using it for 2FA - its just to verify the following:

1. Your in North America (Foreign cell phone numbers wont work)
2. You are actually a real human being (because you have to put it in)
3. You are not planning on committing fraud.

The fraud part cannot be overstated and is worth its own post. Preventing fraud is critically important to us - and there's no way that someone who plans on using our network for illegal calling will give you their personal cell phone number. If we used emails or an automated phone call, it would be too easy for fraudsters to put in fake information using temporary information. Then all they would have to do is put in a stollen credit card, and voila!

The SMS thing is not used for future correspondence and we don't call it or use it ever again. The information we care about is on page two:
)

This is the information we use to contact you. The first page is just about prevent fraud and fake/duplicate accounts.

I get all this, I really do, But SMS to a business is just to onerous. I'm also curious - since VOIP.ms sells numbers that can get SMS - are you able to tell that it's not a cell phone from them and prevent someone from signing up?

As for Non- US numbers, what prevents someone from using a US burner phone to sign up?

what about Jared's situation? where he has a personal account that he used his cellphone for, and now can't sign up again? (OK this one is likely pretty small, but definitely not zero... He - as an IT Pro might have signed up for a personal account, then upon liking it, signed up for a business account - nope.. can't because he only has one cellphone number - unless he goes and gets a burner number).

The ideal situation is to have the end user create their own account and have the IT team administer it. You don't have to share an account - you can create a new account for the IT Administrator and he can administer it directly without sharing credentials. (Thats what @scottalanmiller does)

We are able to determine whether or not a phone number is a true cell phone number pretty accurately. There are industry databases we can query to look that kind of information up.

@Dashrender said in I guess Skyetel doesn't want business:

I appreciate that you are trying to setup real, not fake accounts, please consider changing to email for confirmation instead of SMS.

I had a similar issue with Google the other day. It continues to amaze me at the amount of assumptions we run into in systems these days.

On a side note - My EHR system fully expects that every patient will have their own email address - once we ran into this issue, we started seeing how many couples share a single email address between them. It's crazy, like 2% of people share a single account, this means we run into this issue about once a month.

The problem with other forms of identify verification is that it's not unique to the individual and it is not personally identifying. You can create new emails, you can create new phone numbers to call, etc. The cell phone is unique because its extremely uncommon for people to have more than one. Additionally, the system verifies that the number you specify is indeed a cell phone number prior to sending you the verification SMS.

We're not using it for 2FA - its just to verify the following:

1. Your in North America (Foreign cell phone numbers wont work)
2. You are actually a real human being (because you have to put it in)
3. You are not planning on committing fraud.

The fraud part cannot be overstated and is worth its own post. Preventing fraud is critically important to us - and there's no way that someone who plans on using our network for illegal calling will give you their personal cell phone number. If we used emails or an automated phone call, it would be too easy for fraudsters to put in fake information using temporary information. Then all they would have to do is put in a stollen credit card, and voila!

The SMS thing is not used for future correspondence and we don't call it or use it ever again. The information we care about is on page two:

This is the information we use to contact you. The first page is just about prevent fraud and fake/duplicate accounts.

@Dashrender said in I guess Skyetel doesn't want business:

That's all fine and dandy.. but I can't sign my company up (I'm the IT Admin here) because I'm not giving you my personal cellphone for a company sign up.

Other systems have done setups that get through IVRs to internal extensions - that's what would be needed in my office.

Requiring SMS for business is seemingly absurd.

We don't require it as a means for contacting you - we never use it - its just for the signup process to verify you are a human and to prevent duplicate accounts. On the next step under "Organization Info" it will ask you for the contact information to use.

This is intended behavior. The signup app is designed for the end user to sign up for themselves because they need to accept the terms and conditions; a third party can't accept them on their behalf. In order to have a client sign up, we'd ask that you please direct them to our sign up page and have them sign up for themselves. Then they can give you their credentials so you can administer the account.

@JaredBusch Our hold music is epic bagpipe music, and we have Lenny turned on for our own phone number.

Sometimes you should have some fun while also trying to make some money. They aren't mutually exclusive

@JasGot said in Intentionally Bad Hold Music:

@JaredBusch said in Intentionally Bad Hold Music:

@Scott These things are funny to talk about, but why do it? It is your money being spent for the inbound call.

It's doesn't have to be about the money.

I'd pay $0.05 for a 5 minute recording of a spammer or solicitor listening to that lol

@Scott said in Intentionally Bad Hold Music:

@Skyetel That's it mate! Thanks!

I found the song on youtube, but not the doctored annoyances.

Solid work.

Happy to help!

@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

@WLS-ITGuy said in Block Spam callers:

This time I did a search first

We are getting hammered with cold calls and I am wondering if those of you who have FreePBX have some system/way to block cold/robo calls?

If you are using Skyetel, I'd suggest turning on our Spam Filter:
https://skyetel.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SUG/pages/225312786/Spam+Calls+Filter

That way your end user can still have humans answering the phone and not get inundated with spam calls.