The Vitelity Outage

[Mack Allison]

Who else here was affected by vitelity losing the ability to place outbound calls yesterday? Does anyone have further information on why this happened?

Does any one have any suggestions as to where i might set up outbound trunking for failover in case this happens again?

I don't know what I'd do if the inbound call handling stops for an hour. . . I was able to deal with my customers since they were still getting in bound....if that had stopped i would have had some real problems on my hand.

I would like to add that I have always loved Vitelity. Fact is, they've been so reliable for me that I don't even have a backup plan for them. I followed the link from NerdUno years ago, and have never looked back.

 

[atsak]

Uh, if you can't handle having inbound calling stop for an hour, then VOIP is not for you. Get regular old POTS lines and a gateway, that's the only thing that will give you that kind of uptime. Every single one of my carriers has had an outage of some kind for a period of time over the last 3 years or so at least once.

Suggest you get a toll free or second contact number from a different carrier than your inbound from Vitelity and publish both; that way if one isn't working the other will be.

Secondly, for outbound there's a myriad of options you can setup failover trunks for when Vitelity doesn't work. Telecoms Xchange was one Ward wrote about on Nerdvittles not long ago, there's Anveo Direct, there's Alcazar networks, BulkVS does termination, voip.ms, there's SOOOO many. Choose any of them there's setup instructions here for and you'll just failover automatically for outbound albeit with a bit of post dial delay.

 

[Mack Allison]

Uh, if you can't handle having inbound calling stop for an hour, then VOIP is not for you. Get regular old POTS lines and a gateway, that's the only thing that will give you that kind of uptime. Every single one of my carriers has had an outage of some kind for a period of time over the last 3 years or so at least once.

Suggest you get a toll free or second contact number from a different carrier than your inbound from Vitelity and publish both; that way if one isn't working the other will be.

Secondly, for outbound there's a myriad of options you can setup failover trunks for when Vitelity doesn't work. Telecoms Xchange was one Ward wrote about on Nerdvittles not long ago, there's Anveo Direct, there's Alcazar networks, BulkVS does termination, voip.ms, there's SOOOO many. Choose any of them there's setup instructions here for and you'll just failover automatically for outbound albeit with a bit of post dial delay.

Thanks for the list of outbound providers.

That's a really interesting perspective. Basically you are saying that 20 years later, VoIP is still inherently unreliable, so I should fold up my business and hand the DIDs back to the incumbent carriers in the region. They are all using VoIP through much if not all of their network. As is my Verizon cell phone.

I have multiple failover paths to answer my DID's, and failover numbers. I'm not sure how many DIDs you carry. I work with public safety agencies. Many of them are connected via Avaya and Mitel VoIP systems. They have multiple internet carriers to handle local or distant outages. Still can't so a damn thing if the DID provider doesn't answer the phone.

I think you may have assumed I was a kid at this. I can assure you I am not.

I understand, things happen, and we do our best to pre-plan every possible failure to mitigate them. Then we go hands on to save the last things that get through.

Really, the failure of outbound I could have routed around, and I am adding failover outbound routes as I write this. However, the weakest link in the world would be our DIDs. Yes, publishing multiple routes through different DID providers would alleviate this. Hard for my customer's customers to understand.

Please understand, I'm not bashing Vitelity or VoIP. It's just something that happened one Friday afternoon I thought I might talk about with the only people who speak this language.

 

[dicko]

I would have to concur with @Mack, I guess atsak is not aware that no longer do Frontier or AT&T, or probably anyone, deliver to your DMARC any copper pairs in any major market, neither for FXO or PRI. The world has moved on and for only legacy PBX's are using outdated TDM/FXO signalling,

Given that, the telco's DO have very reliable networks to deliver their services, if you want the same, then you will need your own routable ip network with BGP to survive broken routes and redundant routes to your locations, for that you need to coordinate with your ISP's and choose a provider that is equally able.

 

[steve54301]

The bigger underlying problem is reliability of the residential internet. I have a cable modem connection, and while the downtime is minimal, the uptime is in no way comparable to the stability of a pots line. For instance there are a few pole mounted power supplies that feed the various aerial cable amplifiers. So no backup power there. And rural DSL is an even worse story. When the majority of your business is being done over IP (phones, credit card etc), any business no small, really ought to have two different internet services (dsl and cable) with a fall over router. There is a reason there are municipal broadband projects tying the various goverment agencies together. Things are better when you have control over them. Or at least options, and in many rural areas there is one internet provider, so if downtime is your concern... sadly all you can do is invest in a paddle for when you are up sh*it creek.

 

[atsak]

I think maybe you guys also have misunderstood what I'm saying but also Dicko you're got a factual error. I have about 250 DID's I manage now for a few different companies, delivered mostly via SIP and a few via PRI. The PRI was last down 8 years ago, all the SIP carriers I use have at one point or another for one reason or another. Usually it's fiber cut but it's also been Denial of Service, line card failure, this kind of thing, and not necessarily all of the DID's. Level 3 (now Centurylink) has proven to be the most reliable DID provider I have in the last four or five years, which I access through Voip Innovations (who had a lengthy denial of service outage a couple years ago).

The factual error is the statement that PRI and FXO aren't offered in major markets; Verizon has offered me a T1 PRI in one of the locations where we went looking at options, plus copper FXO (I had a T1 for data there while the fiber was run). So the statement that they don't deliver them in any major market simply isn't true. This was in McLean, VA; DC Metro, for reference, less than 2 years ago. Also, I have a PRI in place up here in Mississauga, Ontario (adjacent to Toronto), from Rogers delivered by Bell Canada. They're expensive, but they offer them. They also offered me SIP options, so I think they are getting there but you can still get both . . .

So the takeaway I leave you with is that things are very good (outages are few and far between) but they happen. It's best to know how to cope with them and minimize the pain. That was the reason behind my suggestion to choose two carriers for DID vs Toll Free, then usually clients have both on hand will try one then the other for those rare events you do have an outage. If this is your first outage with Vitelity in a long time, that's really excellent.

 

[atsak]

The bigger underlying problem is reliability of the residential internet. And rural DSL is an even worse story. When the majority of your business is being done over IP (phones, credit card etc), any business no small, really ought to have two different internet services (dsl and cable) with a fall over router. T.

I've been using LTE as a failover. Landline services may run across the same poles or rights of way and are subject to physical damage simultaneously in many areas, so I've found that works pretty well as an option (and is usually inexpensive if not heavily used)

 

[steve54301]

I've been using LTE as a failover. Landline services may run across the same poles or rights of way and are subject to physical damage simultaneously in many areas, so I've found that works pretty well as an option (and is usually inexpensive if not heavily used)

That's actually what I recommend too for the same reasons

 

[dicko]

As I said before, if you are serious about robust networking, then you should think about BGP, That way you get to be in control.

 

[dghundt]

For inbound did, isn't this where the Vitelity failover setting works?

 

[Eliad]

i have a pfsense dual WAN, cable with backup to DSL.
my main DID is Vitelity with failover to VOIP.MS. then VOIP.MS failover to a message stating the phone is out for just in case VOIP.MS is out too. seems to work well