Switch Telecom

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There'a alot of people on here asking for advice on Voip Providers, I suppose that is the point of the forums.

Here's our experience with Switch Telecom.

We had a fair onboarding with them this month. They dropped the ball on attention to detail. i.e. Did not complete the pbx deployment properly. Music on hold not working. After hours not working. etc. Voicemails not working.
That's small stuff in the greater scheme of things.

Unfortunately also experienced 28 hours of downtime on inbound calls due to catastrophic router failure they experienced in Cape Town. They had no spare gear in Cape Town and don't employ technicians in Cape Town. They seem to use the remote hands supplied by the DC. Hence a full day after the incident they then fly someone down from JHB to Cape Town.

That's a bit underwhelming for an enterprise voip deployment. You have to have hot spares for your primary gear or at least a cold spare nearby. You should have a tech available in a geographic area where you have a node.

If someone knows of a Voip provider with Steller uptime please let me know.

Below is the reply from their technician. No Apology to be found. As a matter of fact the company as a rule does not apologise for downtime. I reckon they would be good for home use but I would never use them for enterprise again.

One of the main routers in Capetown experienced issues yesterday afternoon. Efforts to rectify the issue remotely with the local data centre support failed. Traffic was rerouted to other available data centres in the country. We added a Notice yesterday to identify all clients of the issues we are experiencing, this was not limited to one client but to multiple clients. One of our engineers flew to Capetown this morning to replace the faulty router, they should be still busy with it, once they are done we will update the Notice accordingly. In theory, after rerouting the traffic, calls should not have been affected however we see that some providers are still attempting to send calls to a non-existent router. This will be addressed with the respective providers to ensure that there are able to reroute traffic in the future as per the agreed terms should they be a problem in the future.

 

[RandomGeek]

There'a alot of people on here asking for advice on Voip Providers, I suppose that is the point of the forums.

Here's our experience with Switch Telecom.

We had a fair onboarding with them this month. They dropped the ball on attention to detail. i.e. Did not complete the pbx deployment properly. Music on hold not working. After hours not working. etc. Voicemails not working.
That's small stuff in the greater scheme of things.

Unfortunately also experienced 28 hours of downtime on inbound calls due to catastrophic router failure they experienced in Cape Town. They had no spare gear in Cape Town and don't employ technicians in Cape Town. They seem to use the remote hands supplied by the DC. Hence a full day after the incident they then fly someone down from JHB to Cape Town.

That's a bit underwhelming for an enterprise voip deployment. You have to have hot spares for your primary gear or at least a cold spare nearby. You should have a tech available in a geographic area where you have a node.

If someone knows of a Voip provider with Steller uptime please let me know.

Below is the reply from their technician. No Apology to be found. As a matter of fact the company as a rule does not apologise for downtime. I reckon they would be good for home use but I would never use them for enterprise again.

Eish thats not a good story! And what's the story about a router going down - you always have 2 so if you lose one the other carries on with the customer not even being aware of the issue :-/

Maybe acceptable for consumer use as you say but not sufficient for Enterprise

 

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Eish thats not a good story! And what's the story about a router going down - you always have 2 so if you lose one the other carries on with the customer not even being aware of the issue :-/

Maybe acceptable for consumer use as you say but not sufficient for Enterprise

Yeah its kinda pathetic. You know everyone bashes Telkom for their monopoly and for good reason.
But their ISDN business lines were solid I mean rock solid. As in my own business went though a period of I think a solid decade when I can never recall a down day or complaint from a client.

I don't get why there is such piss poor implementation of VOIP for the enterprise in SA.
Even Euphoria have had like 4 major outages since Jan. One they were down by 6 hours.

What makes it so hard to get stable VOIP. I am not talking about interconnect call break up. I mean system mega-failures where routers are down 28 hours. There is clearly something I am missing.

 

[EbenCBIT]

I bought 2 Yealink SIP T32Gs, Was with Switch tel for almost a year, I'm busy porting my 011 number to Vox.co.za I get uncapped calling for R171 per month.

Besides that, I bought 1 Scoop POE injector 4ports
1 Huawei LTE router
And then I have my Air Fibre connection.

Reaaon I have 2 routers is the Fail over that is provided with the switch, If my Air Fibre drops, I have backup lte, that is connected to a UPS With my Switch that provides power to my devices.

I never had problems with my Setup.