DEAL Lower rates at voip.ms starting Friday 29 Nov

[rastasean]

Dear Ward,

We're pleased to announce a permanent gift that will take effect on Black Friday, November 29th 2013.

For calls to the United States: The USA Premium rate will go down from 1.25 cents ($0.0125) to 1 cent ($0.01). USA Value route is being discontinued in favor of offering solely a premium route at a rate of 1 cent per minute which is lower than the previous price of the value route ($0.0105).

For calls to Canada: Premium route will also be lowered from 1.25 cents ($0.0125) to 1 cent ($0.01). Canada value route (starting at $0.0052) will remain available.

The billing increment for your outgoing calls to USA and Canada remains at 6/6 (the calls get charged incrementally in segments of 6 seconds), that means you do not have to pay for 30 seconds or a whole minute for your calls of very short duration compared to using other providers.

We also now offer wholesale termination custom rates for clients with over 10,000 outgoing minutes per month. Contact us to have a representative assigned to you.

It is because of you, our customers, that VoIP.ms has grown successfully in the year 2013. We would like to constantly show our appreciation for your loyalty. Due to this steady growth we are able to get better discounts and pass them onto you.

Please contact the VoIP.ms support staff via ticket or Live Chat If you have any questions regarding the new changes.

Best regards,

VoIP.ms Team

 

[Bradley Cooper]

I want to like voip.ms - I really do, but my users keep demanding more consistency and I find their support to be pretty frustrating at times. So we just use voip.ms for non-critical calls.

 

[wardmundy]

Bradley Cooper: Funny to hear you say that. We've had just the opposite experience. I think one or two of their POPs have gone down for a few minutes once or twice in the last 5 years. Really doesn't matter since failover is an integral part of their DID setup. Calls have all been near perfect even on the cheapo U.S. trunks (which now have gone away). We just ported a Tier B DID to them in less than 2 weeks, and they adjusted the unlimited inbound calls DID rate to $2 to match Anveo pursuant to their offer on DSL Reports. Got four progress reports from them during the porting process, and DID rate was adjusted within an hour after port completion. Couldn't ask for much better service IMHO.

 

[Hyksos]

Also when you login to their portal they have a widget with all their communications. Thats what I want, transparency, even if im not affected. This way you can know if an issue you think you had or have is related to one of their communications. Over communication... I like that.

 

[Bradley Cooper]

Hi Ward - I am enjoying your tweets, BTW. Gotta say - you must get "Presidential" service from voip.ms! We use them for non-critical calls for our 30-person software engineering office. They seem like good guys and I don't want to "flame" them, but to contrast with your experience, here is factually what we deal with: over an 8 month period or so, dropped calls, very long PDD or failed termination messages, frequent audio quality issues and at one point a server so overloaded on their end that it just randomly gave up in the afternoons (now has been replaced). Just so I can rule out congestion on my end or my broadband connection, I added a network monitor watching both ICMP ping times and SIP Options ping times from my server to their server once per minute. Today the ICMP ping is around 8ms and the SIP options ranges from 15-32ms. I think that's pretty good. Still - 3 reports of call issues today. My "premier" (read: pricey) provider is Level3 and everything is identical other than the trunk selected in Asterisk. Never is there a problem with those calls. Support sometimes solves problems quite well but can be slow to respond. Other times, they ignore important details or packet traces I send, and offer one-size-fits-all type of suggestions like "is it plugged in"? I have so many hours invested in voip.ms I am currently planning to keep them, but my users intentionally use Level3 for client calls now. Wish it were not so, but there it is.

 

[Hyksos]

Did you try switching POP ? You had those issues with multiple POP? This would be hard to believe but not impossible, maybe your calls with which you had issues are all behind a bad route for voip.ms.

I'm not defending them, you look like you did your homework. But support issues with sometimes clueless answers is a reality everywhere. You wouldn't like the bill if an 100K/year engineer answered the support emails

But it does like look like a bad POP so I'm curious if you replicate this horror story across multiple POP over a long enough period. Also like I said maybe you can tell them you will cumulate timestamp with problems description to send over to them for analysis. They could suggest what information you need to cumulate and maybe they can enable some kind of deeper logging on your calls to check if they have a problem toward a certain route or region or across a certain upstream provider.

If I was VOIP.ms I would be interested in a client like you who can actually help find issues which might be affecting other customers who can't provide the required information to track the problem down. If frequent issues every week is something you can replicate and compile details for, I wish they would be interested. But it's also not your job to fight a provider to help them... and I understand that.

The upper management of voip.ms seem responsive also. You could drop an email saying you wish to be contacted for an escalation of recurring issues over very long times. Like I mentioned earlier, knowing your setup, your comparative diag with level3 and knowing your approach is balanced they could be interested in trying to work it out with you.

Martin from Voip.ms was in here at some point, we could @him but I think he's not been back after the crash, or maybe I remember wrong and he was never in here.

Hoping this can help.

 

[Bradley Cooper]

I appreciate all the comments and suggestions. I have tried multiple POP (4 of the closest ones), and I feel like after 8 months this is probably as good as it can get.

If I was VOIP.ms I would be interested in a client like you who can actually help find issues which might be affecting other customers who can't provide the required information to track the problem down. If frequent issues every week is something you can replicate and compile details for, I wish they would be interested.

I can't agree more - that's the exact customer I want - they guy that helps me make my product/service better. I actually have 2 packet monitors running 24/7 so when there is a problem I can send them captures - regardless of all the times I show them that their server sent a hangup mid-call, they do a virtual shoulder shrug. One of the last comments I got was "we don't have many customers experiencing hangups". It would have been nice to hear "thanks for the detailed information - we really want to get to the bottom of this issue".

The upper management of voip.ms seem responsive also. You could drop an email saying you wish to be contacted for an escalation of recurring issues over very long times.

I have asked for escalation through the ticket system but to no avail. I would be happy to talk to someone at voip.ms who has a stake in how they are perceived. Any direct contact information for Martin would be much appreciated. Just yesterday my management here was pushing to make all our calls through Level3 and is willing to accept the cost difference but I'd rather not give up after all the hours I have invested. My original plan was to transition away from Level3 for voice but the confidence level is not sufficiently high to do so.

 

[atsak]

You may want to look at Voip Innovations. I've found it to be more stable than voip.ms and L3 is a carrier they use anyway . . . so the transition is pretty simple. Anveo has also been better than voip.ms (I still use voip.ms as a backup and for some origination).