PSA - We now support Shortcode SMS and are routing all Canadian traffic entirely in Canada.

@travisdh1 said in Postcards for SMS by Skyetel.:

@manxam said in Postcards for SMS by Skyetel.:

@scottalanmiller : Just for clarification, what do you mean that Docker isn't cross platform?

Exactly that, Docker IS NOT CROSS PLATFORM. Build a Docker widget with Ubuntu and you can not run it on CentOS.

I think what's more important than how it works is that it is not intuitive to most people (even me). We write all of our applications for docker because it makes them more resilient and easier to scale, but they are conceptually more difficult for the vast majority of our users who are used to being able to just go to /var/www/html and make the changes they want. We went with docker to maintain that standard, but it has created some headaches for our users who aren't comfortable with it. This is why we're releasing Postcards 1.1 in a OVF and prepackaged.

Its funny that this came up - we're actually working on a big update to Postcards now. This is what is on our development list for the next version (1.1):

Upload Contacts via CSV
Search - Ability to search through messages & contacts
Automated image scaling for images that run larger than 1.5Mb
Giphy Integration - Send Giphys in SMS!
Send Emojis - Send Emojis!
Templates - Have pre-set messages that can be sent with a click of a mouse
Archive Conversations - Ability to close a conversation and hide it from view
Bulk SMS Sending - Ability to send 1 message to multiple recipients via some kind of Queue.
Auto Replies - Be able to automatically reply to a new message
Schedule Sending SMS - Ability to deliver an SMS at a pre-set time
Email Notifications - Ability to notify users that they’ve received an SMS by email using end-user supplied SMTP servers
Postcards Updater - Add the ability to update from one version of Postcards to the next version

The installation installs Docker on the server when you run the script, but with version 1.1 we intend on releasing an OVF and have it as a preconfigured application with both AWS and DigitalOcean to make the install easier. We're even looking at making it so you can deploy it here: https://www.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/ (this will make it easier to update and manage for our users)

@Dashrender said in VoIP Services and AUTO TOP-UP prepaid billing.:

@Skyetel said in VoIP Services and AUTO TOP-UP prepaid billing.:

@Dashrender said in VoIP Services and AUTO TOP-UP prepaid billing.:

@scottalanmiller said in VoIP Services and AUTO TOP-UP prepaid billing.:

@Dashrender said in VoIP Services and AUTO TOP-UP prepaid billing.:

@Skyetel said in VoIP Services and AUTO TOP-UP prepaid billing.:

FWIW - We only top you up to your "Fraud Limit" which is a hard limit on how much we will automatically top you up. By default, the fraud limit is $1,000. This means that we will stop charging your credit card automatically once we have collected $1000 within that month. You can see this fraud limit on the rates & fees page in our portal, and it can only be adjusted by opening a support request.

Nice that it can be adjusted. I'm curious, why is the limit so high to start with? Are most of your customers anywhere near that limit for normal monthly billing?

Well, for a fraud limit, you need it way higher than anyone's normal. Like at least 2-3 times higher, or its useless. You don't want fraud alerts for "a busy month" of normal traffic.

NTG is around $400/mo of real traffic, so $1,000 is actually on the low side for us as a fraud limit.

Sure, which is why I asked if the norm was pretty high... The adjustment via support I assume can be up or down. $1000 just seem like a high starting number to me, but then again I'm dealing with tiny sites where the average monthly bill is $30, so a spike means $90 - $1000 is more than two years worth of billing.

Just a question, not a wrong or right answer from Skyetel.

Yea, you can adjust it up or down. Among our customers, $25 is our lowest and our highest is $50,000. The system has a minimum of $10 and a maximum of $100,000. Anything above that and we require a separate agreement, letters of credit from a bank, and we switch you to Invoicing instead of auto-recharge.

I'm surprised it's that high for moving to invoicing, CC fees can be killers. But very cool on the rest!

Ah - we can move people to invoicing at any amount over ~$3,000/mo. It just comes with a contract. Larger companies or school districts can't use credit cards, so they have to be invoiced. They also can't just click "Accept" to terms of service. Lawyers have to get involved, terms and rate sheets agreed to, etc. Its a whole thing and we accommodate them. The vast majority of our customers use prepay like everyone here and is the method we recommend and prefer.

@Dashrender said in VoIP Services and AUTO TOP-UP prepaid billing.:

@scottalanmiller said in VoIP Services and AUTO TOP-UP prepaid billing.:

@Dashrender said in VoIP Services and AUTO TOP-UP prepaid billing.:

@Skyetel said in VoIP Services and AUTO TOP-UP prepaid billing.:

FWIW - We only top you up to your "Fraud Limit" which is a hard limit on how much we will automatically top you up. By default, the fraud limit is $1,000. This means that we will stop charging your credit card automatically once we have collected $1000 within that month. You can see this fraud limit on the rates & fees page in our portal, and it can only be adjusted by opening a support request.

Nice that it can be adjusted. I'm curious, why is the limit so high to start with? Are most of your customers anywhere near that limit for normal monthly billing?

Well, for a fraud limit, you need it way higher than anyone's normal. Like at least 2-3 times higher, or its useless. You don't want fraud alerts for "a busy month" of normal traffic.

NTG is around $400/mo of real traffic, so $1,000 is actually on the low side for us as a fraud limit.

Sure, which is why I asked if the norm was pretty high... The adjustment via support I assume can be up or down. $1000 just seem like a high starting number to me, but then again I'm dealing with tiny sites where the average monthly bill is $30, so a spike means $90 - $1000 is more than two years worth of billing.

Just a question, not a wrong or right answer from Skyetel.

Yea, you can adjust it up or down. Among our customers, $25 is our lowest and our highest is $50,000. The system has a minimum of $10 and a maximum of $100,000. Anything above that and we require a separate agreement, letters of credit from a bank, and we switch you to Invoicing instead of auto-recharge.

@Dashrender

We wanted the limit to be high enough to where you wouldn't have to worry about hitting it unintentionally, but low enough to where you wouldn't get a crushingly hard credit card bill. We figured that $1,000 for a business was a safe balance between high enough and low enough. We also needed to account for customers who suddenly have a big burst in their traffic (which happens more often than I would have guessed). Believe it or not, we actually have many more tickets around people unexpectedly hitting it instead of people hitting it due to fraud.

The Top Up limit is only part of our auto-recharge fraud prevention. For international, we have very strict dollar limits you can spend (that you specify in our portal), a maximum outbound channel limit, and dedicated international gateways. So far this has effectively blocked all of the international fraud on our network and protected huge amounts of money with our customers.

For domestic traffic, you can specify concurrent channel limits in our portal that will SMS you if your channel counts suddenly spike.

Taken together, we are pretty proud of our success rate in keeping fraud down on our network

FWIW - We only top you up to your "Fraud Limit" which is a hard limit on how much we will automatically top you up. By default, the fraud limit is $1,000. This means that we will stop charging your credit card automatically once we have collected $1000 within that month. You can see this fraud limit on the rates & fees page in our portal, and it can only be adjusted by opening a support request.

I'm definitely out of my wheelhouse, but we've used this and loved it: https://www.spamhero.com/

Now we use Google Apps

@JasGot @JaredBusch

Jared answered things pretty completely, but I wanted to quickly add my feelings.

We've looked a lot at ways to make 911 cheaper for our users with larger facilities (we're pretty popular with School Districts, and carry the traffic for universities everyone in this forum would know - so we deal with this a lot).

While there are ways where we could allow more than one address per phone number and allow you to change things dynamically (like with a SIP packet or a customer CID prefix), I don't have the confidence in NENA and a lot of the PSAPs to trust peoples lives with it. Additionally - even if I did, I still would strongly hesitate to allow more dynamic control of 911 simply because when you increase complexity of something you increase the error rate. Errors with 911 mean people die. A scenario where a misconfiguration sends emergency help to the wrong location without the caller or 911 operator knowing a mistake was made literally turns my stomach.

Putting aside our own liability concerns, my philosophy (speaking as Skyetel's President :D) is that with 911 we have a duty to keep things as reliable and as simple as possible until the industry at large shifts away from DID/Address association and to GPS coordination (or something easy to use that has a low failure rate). The cost of 911 is annoyingly high (its even really expensive for us, and we do a lot of it) and I would love for this whole system to be replaced with something better. However, at the end of the day, I want your 911 calls to be delivered correctly, even if that costs everyone more money. We'll let others be innovative here first and follow the pack when the industry shifts.

@Dashrender This would be where I'd run it by an attorney for your specific use case.

I don't know if a private office inside of a conventional office space would apply for this. If your office is only like 3,000 sqft, then once you open the main door you are able to see more or less everything in one glance. However, if you are in a 20,000sqft office, then you would indeed need to provide additional details like "NW Corner Office" or "Blue Office Door" etc. However, that's my conjecture. Check with an attorney

I can also add that we have a lot of unhappy customers about this, so you are not alone in your frustration. Its exacerbated by how expensive E911 is, even for carriers like us. I wish they had come up with some form of pricing relief in the ruling in order to comply with this. I also wish they would reform E911 entirely and stop tieing it to phone numbers, but that is a soap box saved for another day.

I'll preface this by saying:
1. I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
2. Please contact an attorney to ask this question.
3. The below advice is our interpretation and should be understood as a suggestion, not legal advice.

Now that the corporatey stuff is over...

Our understanding is that Kari's law wants you to configure 911 so that emergency responders know which door to open inside of the big building. If it is a large school, then which classroom door should they open. If it is a hotel, then which room. etc.

To that end, if your customer has multiple floors, then yea, you would need to configure an E911 address for that floor which would be unique to that phone number. Before Kari's law, it was common for installers to just use the address of a school campus, and not provide additional details. It saved them money, but was not helpful in emergency situations since some school campuses are as large as small cities and more detailed information is required.

FWIW, we like 3CX a lot. We worked really closely with them to get certified as one of their preferred providers (which took months), and got to see a lot behind the curtain. Their support engineers really know their stuff and our customers find them to be pretty accessible. They're really good about not over committing their development teams too - so when they roll stuff out, it's generally pretty solid. Just figured I'd throw our opinion in here

@JaredBusch said in SIP, PBX, E911 routing and teminology.:

@JasGot said in SIP, PBX, E911 routing and teminology.:

The provider is Skyetel, and they will not/can not re-write the outbound caller ID based on a calling plan/route. My first choice would be to have Skyetel re-write all outbound caller IDs to be the main number UNLESS the dialed number was "911".

That is not the job of the provider. That is the job of the PBX.

FWIW - there are providers that do this (not us though). Its extremely expensive as you have to own all the phone numbers you are using, and the rates to do this are very high.

SIP Trunking by IP is so much better than registration, we don't even allow you to register.

About a year ago, a customer came to us from one of our competitors that used SIP Registration. A hacker broke into his PBX, and instead of relaying all the calls through his PBX like they normally do, they got his SIP Trunking username & password for his carrier. They then proceeded to register half a dozen systems and burned through tens of thousands of dollars before the carrier realized something was wrong. They then forced him to pay the bill (which is why he quickly looked to move away to us).

I can rant all day about the pitfalls of SIP Registration, but I shall refrain

Maybe this?
https://mangolassi.it/topic/20290/ad-blockers-advice

Thanks for the kind feedback

Tips:

1. Make sure your firewall is not killing the open UDP port. We see this a lot. Especially if the users are working from home.
2. Lower your SIP Registration and NAT Keepalive (or enable the NAT Keepalive if its disabled)
3. Insure you have NAT = Yes in the extension settings
4. Wait for @JaredBusch - he'll probably know what the issue is

@JaredBusch said in Skyetel tenant functionality:

Well, the month rolled, and so I now have a report.

The tenant report is awesomely detailed for those that actually care about sending something on to a client.

In my use case, the client just needed location specific break out, so I only care about the totals. But OMFG the awesomeness of the numbers....

Great work on this part @Skyetel

Thanks @JaredBusch We're really proud of this!

Since @JaredBusch has been kind enough to teach everyone about our Tenant feature, I figured I'd give you guys a preview of this before anyone else - but here's a pre-alpha version of the Tenant Portal. Its still getting love by our front end team, but this is what the dashboard will more or less look like:

Hey Guys,

We released this feature a little while ago, but just did a very small update that automatically turns on fraud alerting for all accounts. For those interested, please have a look at this: https://skyetel.atlassian.net/wiki/x/AYA4KQ

The original announcement can be found here:
https://skyetel.com/introducing-fraud-alerts/

We want you to be safe out there