"Disconnected" Message?

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:

Quote:

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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.

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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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Quote:

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Originally Posted by rcrcr

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

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I second the thoughts expressed.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by 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

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

My suggestion (if it's possible):

Assuming that the PSTN timeout is set at 5 seconds, where if there's no valid response within that time, the upstream carrier gets a 'network unavailable' error code and plays the disconnected intercept...

Could Voipo's front-line server/incoming call gateway (assuming that's not the point of failure) have a timeout of, say, 4.5 seconds, after which it plays back a "There appears to be temporary trouble with this line. Please hang up and try your call again." message? I'd much rather someone calling me have to try calling me again than have them get an incorrect message indicating that my number has been disconnected! :eek: I know - ideally, there's no (OK, very little) latency within your network, but it would be a nice backup feature. That is, of course, assuming that you would not be able to have your system follow the failover instructions in the user's vPanel...

If Voipo can detect a problem it should use the failover number.

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Originally Posted by holmes4

If Voipo can detect a problem it should use the failover number.

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I agree Steve. I have had several people tell me that they get a disconnected message. To me this should NEVER happen and fail over to the phone # listed in the account.

Also, to many "data center" issues. Move your hardware out to the east cost.. <smile>

I guess what I don't get about this, which is not unique to Voipo, is if I unplug my adapter calls will get redirected to the failover number, but if the adapter doesn't respond properly callers get a "disconnected" message? Why should that be?

I got the "disconnected" message while calling home around 6.50pm. Everything seems to be fine now. Not sure if it was just a network hiccup.

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Originally Posted by sr98user

I got the "disconnected" message while calling home around 6.50pm. Everything seems to be fine now. Not sure if it was just a network hiccup.

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Nope, no network issues. Can you (and anyone experiencing it) open a ticket about this with some info about the caller? Ideally their number/approximate time they called and their carrier if you have it.

I want to get in touch with our upstream carrier to make sure there is not something going on on their end if you got this today since there were no network issues at all.

There was one time in the past where an upstream vendor had a trunk that was hitting capacity from one of their peering partners (one of the major wireless companies) and they just needed to add more capacity there. I almost wonder if this could be something like that since a handful of people are still reporting it and if we can get some samples and isolate it more (like if it's callers from specific carriers) we can approach them about it to have them double check things on their end as well.

CQD-793481 was created with the information you need. Thanks.

True story ... every time my wife called me from her cell 1 day last week she'd get the "disconnected" message. Just her cell. Turns out I "accidentally" blacklisted her.

Glad I didn't send a support request on that one!

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Originally Posted by MisterEd

True story ... every time my wife called me from her cell 1 day last week she'd get the "disconnected" message. Just her cell. Turns out I "accidentally" blacklisted her.

Glad I didn't send a support request on that one!

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Ewww! You just gave me an idea ..:rolleyes: