"Disconnected" Message?

[rcrcr]

I know there were some datacenter issues yesterday, and appreciate the clear, prompt information about these issues from Voipo on this forum and elsewhere.

In regards to those issues, I saw this comment on a thread on DSLReports.com:

I am getting calls again. However I just found out from two folks that tried to call me yesterday during the problem that they received a "this number has been disconnected" message.

As a Voipo customer, this is troubling to me. The possibility that a caller might ever hear a message that my number was disconnected is FAR less palatable to me than just the possibility of a temporary outage in which calls default to failover forwarding, go directly to voicemail, or even failover to a message stating "TEMPORARY trouble" or something and asking the caller to try again.

Can someone from Voipo comment on what exactly happened here, why the poster quoted above may have experienced a "disconnected" message with his line, and how confident I can be as a Voipo customer that this will not happen in the future?

Thanks so much,
rcrcr


Source thread from DSLReports.com is here:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r242...COM-voipo-down

[jlachowin]

During the outage yesterday, I just got a busy signal when calling my VOIPo number. Maybe it varies from ATA to ATA? The message "number has been disconnected" is very dis-concerning though.

[Xponder1]

In the past during some outages I have also heard the disconnected message. I was also concerned by it.

[ctaranto]

I haven't had that problem with VOIPo, but my last provider, VoicePulse, also had similar issues (though rare).

[holmes4]

I had that problem twice with Vonage. The trouble is that, unless the caller contacts you some other way, you may be oblivious to the issue.

[VOIPoTim]

There's really no way around it. We don't play the recording and our underlying carriers don't play the recording. If there is a failure or error, an error code is generated in the signaling and passed up stream until it gets to the caller's carrier. The interpret the code and play the appropriate response (for failure, this is busy).

Part of the issue is that if there is a failure due to an internet outage or something like that, the failure would be the same as any other failure so there is no way to differentiate. If CLECs try to interpret then they are not standard compliant which causes even more issues.

When there is a failure between VOIPo and our end user, we use our failover feature, but if the problem is from the phone network to VOIPo, there's not a lot that can be done to prevent it.

[rcrcr]

Thank you for this frank explanation, Tim. What you write makes sense from a technical perspective, and your candor on this forum, as always, is a huge plus in terms of evaluating Voipo against other providers. Seriously: thanks.

I understand what you're saying: that if the Voipo upstream connectivity to the phone network is down, that the specific failure messages are up to the caller's carrier, and these carriers interpret error codes in non-standard and often non-ideal ways (ie: "disconnected" message).

However, that does not make the prospect of "disconnected" messages being served up to callers of Voipo customers' lines any more palatable.

If anything, I would hope it would serve as a challenge to the Voipo team to give some thought to their upstream agreements and technical infrastructure, to the end of making moves to absolutely minimize the chances of this particular kind of outage (ie: upstream failover, redundant providers, etc?) and letting your customers know (in your trademark open and honest fashion) what your plans (current and future) are on that front.

There is so much to like about Voipo. Customer service. Feature set. And of course, cost. But personally, I would be more than willing to pay a slightly higher price to help ensure better upstream connectivity and failover handling.

Thoughts?

rcrcr

[ctaranto]

The same thing happens to the "higher priced" vendors (like Vonage). I used to have them. I would know.

I agree it's a very challenging problem to solve, but this doesn't exist due to the price point.

-Craig

[Russell]

If anything, I would hope it would serve as a challenge to the Voipo team to give some thought to their upstream agreements and technical infrastructure, to the end of making moves to absolutely minimize the chances of this particular kind of outage (ie: upstream failover, redundant providers, etc?) and letting your customers know (in your trademark open and honest fashion) what your plans (current and future) are on that front.

There is so much to like about Voipo. Customer service. Feature set. And of course, cost. But personally, I would be more than willing to pay a slightly higher price to help ensure better upstream connectivity and failover handling.

Thoughts?

rcrcr

I second the thoughts expressed.

[voxabox]

Thank you for this frank explanation, Tim. What you write makes sense from a technical perspective, and your candor on this forum, as always, is a huge plus in terms of evaluating Voipo against other providers. Seriously: thanks.

I understand what you're saying: that if the Voipo upstream connectivity to the phone network is down, that the specific failure messages are up to the caller's carrier, and these carriers interpret error codes in non-standard and often non-ideal ways (ie: "disconnected" message).

However, that does not make the prospect of "disconnected" messages being served up to callers of Voipo customers' lines any more palatable.

If anything, I would hope it would serve as a challenge to the Voipo team to give some thought to their upstream agreements and technical infrastructure, to the end of making moves to absolutely minimize the chances of this particular kind of outage (ie: upstream failover, redundant providers, etc?) and letting your customers know (in your trademark open and honest fashion) what your plans (current and future) are on that front.

There is so much to like about Voipo. Customer service. Feature set. And of course, cost. But personally, I would be more than willing to pay a slightly higher price to help ensure better upstream connectivity and failover handling.

Thoughts?

rcrcr

IMHO, implementing this very feature set will make VOIPo stand out of the VOIP market