QUESTION:
I just realized I forgot to ask you about your support!
What type of support do you offer with your SIP trunk services? Do you have some sort of coverage 24/7? Do you enforce SLAs?
Do you have some capture and analysis tools or maybe a voice eng team to help troubleshoot any of the usual setup/operations issues?
(I am asking because we have had some experiences on which troubleshooting from the provider end was crucial to identify and/or resolve some issues, especially when some of networking gear was limited on storage/cpu/etc to run decent traces)
Please feel free to include any details you believe could help us better understand what you can and can’t offer us in terms of support.
Lastly, can you work as a media gateway for some of our customers? (media relay)
ANSWER:
Our support is 9am to 6pm mountain time. However, our customers are given escalation cell phone numbers in the event of an emergency in which we will answer any time day or night. Normally, we know of any outage before our customers. We have an internally developed system called RoboDog that tests various aspects of our platform and tests phone calls. These send alerts when there are issues. As far as the SLA’s, we only enforce them when there have been long lasting major outages which haven’t occurred in years.
We capture the SIP call tree on each call leg and are available online for you to see. If there are specific operational issues we use wiresharks for more detail and to look at the RTP. HMP Elements also keeps some statistics on the RTP timings and packet loss or delays.
I can say that our support staff are generally more experienced than you would find at any carrier and that you would be very satisfied with the quick resolution of any issue. I think you have already seen that from us.
As far as media relay, our SBC’s have that capability. I would need more detail on the specific application. That is not our default mode, normally the RTP is sent directly from point A to point B and is not relayed through the SBC.
Let me know if I answered your questions.