Please help with suggestions - voip service

[jackfinn]

Hi all, I have been reading this forum and I find it to be an amazing source of information. This time I will need to ask for your suggestions.

We implemented 3CX just about 2 months ago. We were using a Patton gateway for our PRI line that was there from our previous system. Two weeks ago we switched to SIP trunk, we signed up with Nexvortex because 3CX told me that they were the preferred company. For the past 3 day we have been getting terrible and intermittent service, I made no headway with their support people and after calling all of the other listed trunk providers all knew about some issue but nobody wanted to share anything. My job is on the line here and I need to resolve this right away, can you please suggest the best course of action? Is spotty service the norm with SIP trunk? If I switch, what is my best option among the certified ones? I am sorry for asking so many questions, I just cannot make another mistake we depend on the phones. Thank you

 

[leejor]

For the past 3 day we have been getting terrible and intermittent service

A lot depends on what this actually means. Do you mean dropped calls, or calls not completing properly? Do you mean poor voice quality. The first could be your provider, but could be something at your end (network/router), as well. the second may also be at your network end, but could be your ISP and the demand you are putting on the service you have with them.

You will have to provide more specifics.

 

[sigma1]

They have been up and down for 2 days now, it is the provider.
I personally helped out the sales group for the past 2 days and I have heard this hundreds of times while we had to shift staff and extend hours to handle the massive influx of down clients.
When switching away from PRI to SIP trunking, if service quality and reliability is important to match your previous PRI experience and expectations you need to work with a provider/carrier and not a re seller. That should narrow down your list to one or two from the list.

Charles

 

[gschwab]

I have been with Nexvortex for a couple of years now, They have had some issues on Monday and Tuesday, looks like it is all corrected now. This is the first time I have had any issues with them at all, I look at it like any other utility, sometimes things happen. We once lost POTS phone service for 2 days before switching to VOIP because someone dug up a huge cable and another time power was out for three days due to hurricane damage.....it happens.

 

[nexvortexLuke]

Jack,
I have worked with nexvortex and 3cx for 5 years now. I was also at another power house sip provider for close to 5 years. Nexvortex certainly had a bumpy week, but that is not indicative of our company. We have been selling sip trunking for close to 7+ years and have had a single handful of issues like this. We are not perfect, and with networks of this scale, there is a lot of moving parts. There is no provider including PRI's that are 100% immune to things like this. Just ask Apple or even the bulletproof amazon EC2 cloud. Probably 90% of our customers are on month to month contracts and have been for several years and yet we maintain a less than 1% churn rate. Every day we have to earn their business. I care very much about nexvortex and the customers. Anybody who has worked with me knows how passionate I am, and also my entire team. I would love an opportunity to see if we can regain your trust.

Thanks
Luke@nexvortex

703-439-2711

 

[tsukraw]

I am right there with @gschwab
We have been with NexVortex for close to 2 years now and this is the first real period of outages we have seen with them.
It doesnt matter what type of service you go with you are bound to see a outage every now and then. The same type of outage could hit a POTS/PRI circuit as well with lines getting hint and such when digging.

I know during the outage NexVortex was hard to get on the phone due to the heavy call volume they were getting but from that they are working on a better customer notification system to let you know what is going on when issues happen.

If you still are considering looking to other carriers one item i would recommend you ask or check out is how does there support work. I have worked with a few other carriers and one thing that i think NexVortex is amazing as is there support. Every once and a while like with POTS/PRI we will have issues calling to a specific town, area code, phone number. NexVortex support is by far one of the best i have worked with. The people who answer the phone are not just dime a dozen operators, they are truly knowledgeable about SIP and willing to do whatever it takes to resolve your issue as soon as possible. I know the outages had everyone ready to pull there hair out but like i said that is not a every day even and hopefully we will see some additional network enhancements come out of it.

 

[craigreilly]

I've been with Sigma since May 1st and am not looking back.
I do suggest having a backup provider in place just in case...

 

[jackfinn]

Hey Craig I switched to them too. To test their tech support I called them at 4AM to see if they had support staff and a 3cx support guy was right on the phone, i pressed the emergency support option at the drec. I called this morning and spoke with Charles for almost an hour, signed up and 10 minutes later of their support geeks, Wayne called me to setup the trunk, that took no more than two minutes setup and he also fine tuned my 3cx setup and explained to me some options that I could use for quality of service. I was very impressed and hope that it lasts that way. Luke on an average day we had at least 5 one way audio calls with you guys and never was there a solution, today we had no one way audio at all, it wasn't my router as ya all kept telling me. No way I am coming back if we have trouble again I will get a pri again. Passion is one thing results is another these folks delivered results, it doesn't make up for our losses or the egg in my face but nobody had any complaint first time in 2 weeks, that was refreshing. Thank you Charles and Wayne. JF

 

[nexvortexLuke]

Jack,
I am glad you found somebody to work with and apologize for the issues. I hope you have better luck in the future!
Luke

 

[jackfinn]

Luke it's a lesson learned the hard way I too hope for better fortune for the future. I was very upset reading your original reply because you guys had weeks to resolve certain issues, the outage was just the last drop, to bring up churn rate, monthly terms and apple it makes no sense to me. What matters to me is the issue I experienced and the way it was handled. I must have not been speaking with whomever tsukraw calls there because my support experience was nowhere near that. No more one way audio, no issue immediate support response and access to every level of the company sold me on the move. If this holds up you have a new fan. JF

 

[sigma1]

Jack,

Thank you for your business and trust. I will pas along to Wayne. In fairness, Luke has a point, every company has issues once in a while, we do to. We had a 12 seconds "outage" during the last 12 months luckily it was during the week-end. I am very proud of my team and we are always very aware of the fact that while honored to have clients in every industry, a very large part of our traffic is from top financial companies the likes of Chase and large hospital systems. Outage is not a word they understand.

Support is my baby, passion fuels our company in every way but accountability, extreme planning as well as the most rigorous training and an office philosophy that promotes creativity and "yes we can" attitude makes my team able to tackle any issue with confidence. Every challenge with enthusiasm and expertise to exceed all expectations.

Our SIP trunk infrastructure is like no other and deeply rooted in our core competency of highly sophisticated and redundant networking (30 years of experience myself alone), we have been tasked by several carriers with the planning and deployment of their data centers, we took that experience back home and keep on refining it every day. In selecting our gear, we went completely overboard with the expectation of delivering Video and WebRTC requiring heavy resource utilization. We ended up with handling 140MM minutes every month on a very bad month while looking at our resources peaking at 6%. Pushing the envelope is the norm and looking to brush with failure is what we seek. this tells us when to take a step back, in the lab that is. In production we are very conservative, reliability, performance, quality and white glove service and support is what we offer. We too promote a no commitment whatsoever relationship (not even month to month, but minute by minute), if at any time we don't deserve the customer's trust, they are free to go, and we don't charge any account closing fee.

I am incredibly proud of of my people, my partners, 3CX being atop of that list for allowing us to craft the impossible with their software. Some in the industry say that we are not "easy" meaning that we don't sugar coat anything and we are always brutally honest and direct but all agree that we always bring to the table our A game with resources to spare while realizing that we serve businesses seeking dependability, quality and value. To be a SIP provider catering to the 3CX community it is just natural that our support group had to be 3CX Advance Certified and demonstrate their skills in the field prior to providing any support... how many other providers require this?

Extended phone outages can easily amount to major financial losses to both the end user and the reseller. In short, we do it and we do it right while managing explosive unexpected growth and the need to ensure the highest standard of service. Many 3CX resellers and integrators have partnered with us for a reason, those that never tried us don't know the difference.

 

[jackfinn]

Just a quick update, 3 days of service now and no one-way calls at all, we had at least 5-6 a day before.
Other quick tip, if I leave the SIP trunk with Sigmavoip on g722 in 3CX, occasionally my Yealink phones would drop the call upon picking up the handset. I set all the codec selection on the phones to g722 and the issue is resolved. Great end for a week that started bad. My dids port on monday, once I check everything I will post my final observations.