The more things change the more they stay the same. New VoIP providers acting like old-school telcos.

Why is it that new phone service providers find it necessary to act like old-school telcos? I thought the new era of IP communications was supposed to bring a wave of new era thinking!?

Your new telephone company?

Here is something that really bugs me.. When a service provider can not deliver service as advertised (let’s say because they can’t provide proper far-end NAT traversal for instance) and then implies this is the customer’s problem to solve. In this situation the providers seem to make it their mission in life to put the customer through absolute hell before admitting to the fact that their service does not work without quite a bit of heavy lifting, on behalf of the customer.

I just spent the better half of a day solving problems for one of our Response Point customers (bought a systems few months back) who took service from a US provider claiming to be able to deliver service in Canada for Response Point. After several hours of waiting on the provider to solve the problems (no inbound calling for starters), the customer requested that I “please do anything to fix this”.

I installed an SMB Digital Voice package and had the original service provider forward the customer’s numbers to the new SMB Digital Voice phone number. The customer’s phone service has been restored. 

Unfortunately, the customer is now being held hostage by the current service provider who is insisting that in order for their service to function, the customer must now;

1. Make all sorts of changes in their existing firewall. And / Or
2.  Buy a special Firewall traversal device.

As a service provider, if you advertise your service as being “certified” or “compliant” with Response Point but can’t get your service working with Response Point, don’t make the customer pay for your lack of interoperability testing! 

A note to Response Point customers looking for service for their new small office phone systems, “don’t sign any long term contracts with service providers you have little or no experience with”.

If you are buying or have bought Response Point, and you are looking for a “certified” Response Point service provider, this is the list you should be going by, published directly from Microsoft’s VoIP Service Provider website. If the provider is not on this list, it’s likely a safe bet that they are not certified.

	NGT http://www.ngt.com
	Cbeyond http://www.cbeyond.com
	Junction Networks http://www.junctionnetworks.com
	Packet 8 http://business.packet8.net/virtual_trunking/index.html
	Bandwidth.com http://www.bandwidth.com