Telkom VoIP mess explained
Telkom says that issues with its voice Softswitches and a codec mismatch were to blame for call cut-offs and one-way speech problems for voice calls to South African Voice over IP (VoIP) providers.
Numerous Voice over IP (VoIP) providers in South Africa complained that when anyone called from a Telkom line to a ported number last week, the recipient would be met with one way speech. “The caller would hear the person they called, but the recipient would not hear the caller,” one industry player explained.
Numerous large VoIP providers, including Nashua Communications and Internet Solutions, confirmed that the Telkom problems affected their subscribers.
VoIP providers said that, while they were aware of the problems, the lack of communication from Telkom is of concern.
Wayne Speechly, communication services executive at Internet Solutions, said that the company has not been given any information around the source of issue or what was done to rectify it.
“Challenges and issues of this nature are not good for the industry at large as it brings about uncertainty in the minds of end-users. Inevitably, technology and problems are synonymous, however it is imperative that we can understand what issues occur, why they occur and what has been done to circumvent this in the past,” said Speechly.
Wayne Speechly
Andy Openshaw, MD of Nashua Communications, said that the issue appears to be related to poor planning and a lack of change control processes at Telkom. “Telkom runs backbone network and interconnection services for most of the operators in the SA market,” said Openshaw.
Another VoIP provider said that his company had poor responses from Telkom and that he lost lots of business because of this issue. “This equates to anti-competitive behavior,” he said.
Telkom explains VoIP problems
Telkom explained that on Monday 19 November, call cut-offs and one-way speech problems were detected in its network.
“Telkom’s technical personnel at its Network Operations Centre quickly isolated the fault that was attributed to a failure in a front-end periphery element in one Telkom’s voice Softswitches,” said Telkom.
“Calls affected were across the spectrum of voice traffic that passed through this particular Softswitch and not partial to any one provider. The fault was rectified shortly thereafter; restoring stability to the network completely by Wednesday 21 November.”
“Subsequently, further diagnostics indicated a codec mismatch that continued causing one-way speech to a VoIP provider. This matter was rectified and the matter fully resolved by on Friday, 23 November.”
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