@Dashrender said in Find what carrier hosts a phone number:

@Skyetel said in Find what carrier hosts a phone number:

I can go into further detail if you need - but the end user's relationship is almost always with Alltel and not Windstream. If you are looking for who the customer has a relationship with, then thats a lot harder (its usually confidential). But which LEC is in the LERG or has the LRN is public information if you know where to look

I did want to know who the customer had a relationship with- mainly to see if that one carrier was having an issue, or if there was a systemic issue in the phone fabric.

Cox claimed that their outage yesterday was basically the equivalent of a BGP issue - The central router that routes numbers crashed so calls couldn't be routed. I suppose I could be mistaken on my comparison to BGP..

As I mentioned, the site in the OP did tell me the "who the client has a relationship with" which is what I wanted to know.
Why would that information be confidential?

Cox is an example of a carrier where the "Registrar" is same company as the "DNS Provider" to keep torturing my analogy. So thats why it showed up. There's a bunch fo databases for phone numbering - so depending on where you look you may see different information. Its all accurate, its just used for different things.

It's not always confidential, it just depends on the carriers CPNI and Privacy Policy. Its confidential for us - we don't share who our customers are without a court order. Some carriers are less worried about it.

@Dashrender said in Find what carrier hosts a phone number:

@Skyetel said in Find what carrier hosts a phone number:

@Dashrender Are you trying to find the Service Provider or the data in LERG? A good way to think of that is are you trying to find who is the Domain Registrar or who is the DNS Service Provider?

If you have a particular number in mind, and want to see which service provider (like Skyetel, Voip.MS, Flowroute, etc) thats different than seeing what is in LERG.

Actually - when I first saw that - I assumed it was a script error and didn't actually read it. Now on second glance, I see there is useful information in there.

Personally - I want to know the Carrier - Cox, AT&T, Verizon, Skyetel, etc... that is what I got from the link I posted.

I see in the picture that the number I put in mentions WindStream - but the site I used says Alltel

The difference between Alltel and WindStream is the equivalent difference between Godaddy and DNSMadeEasy. WindStream is the "Name Server" and Alltel is the "DNS Provider." They will usually be different from each other for most carriers, but sometimes they match up. It depends on the phone number and the carriers coverage and network. This is also true for VoIP numbers that have SMS enabled - those will return different results too.

I can go into further detail if you need - but the end user's relationship is almost always with Alltel and not Windstream. If you are looking for who the customer has a relationship with, then thats a lot harder (its usually confidential). But which LEC is in the LERG or has the LRN is public information if you know where to look

@Dashrender Are you trying to find the Service Provider or the data in LERG? A good way to think of that is are you trying to find who is the Domain Registrar or who is the DNS Service Provider?

If you have a particular number in mind, and want to see which service provider (like Skyetel, Voip.MS, Flowroute, etc) thats different than seeing what is in LERG.

This is a good resource too:
https://apeiron.io/lrn

Gotcha - thanks for the feedback

@scottalanmiller said in ombutel.com:

@JaredBusch said in ombutel.com:

@scottalanmiller said in ombutel.com:

@JaredBusch said in ombutel.com:

@stuartjordan said in ombutel.com:

@jaredbusch are you planning to stay with Freepbx for the foreseeable future, or are you looking at other options?

For the current time yes.

FusionPBX is nice, but not something I would be comfortable turning up for a client and walking away from, the work would be nice, but I do not try to force a client to be dependent on us.

Issabel is just not ready for production yet.

Wazo is in the same state as FusionPBX. Not something I would turn a client loose on, but great for someone like us that knows PBX systems.

These things all seem to be about the same as before. FreePBX doesn't seem to be moving forward in any serious way and has always been "good enough, but not impressive" and Issabel seems to have Petered out, Wazo is to nascent, FusionPBX better for a different use case. These factors seem to rule out the alternatives.

They certainly are. Thus the only remaining discussion is VitalPBX really that much better that you will give up Open Source for Closed Source?

That's how I'm feeling, yes. Open source > Closed source for sure. But good product > poor product as well. FreePBX led the pack only after all the competitors fell away. I'd love to see a quality open source alternative arise and I'd switch no question. But I don't feel that the source license in an essentially stateless product that can be trivially swapped out carries enough weight to warrant using FreePBX over VitalPBX.

I am surprised that there isn't more support for FusionPBX on ML. We've found it to be rock solid once you get over the learning curve.

Duh - You said that above. Sorry I missed it @JaredBusch

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe VitalPBX is Ombutel:
https://vitalpbx.org/en/ombutel-change-name/

@fuznutz04 said in Skyetel's Spring Update:

@Skyetel said in Skyetel's Spring Update:

Our retail pricing is also lower and our relationship pricing is much lower. We also don't have a lot of the volume requirements that they do to get into the more aggressive pricing (we do have other requirements detailed here: https://mangolassi.it/topic/19453/skyetel-relationship-pricing)

Thanks! What about the underlying technology? In other words, Flowroute has their "Hyper network" to minimize outages, and also directly routes audio traffic. According to the documentation I found on your site, it appears that you have the same type of technology. Is that correct?

Another thing that Flowroute that they market as a positive, is that they are a carrier themselves. Is Skyetel also a carrrier?

Yes - we both route our calls so that we are not in the audio path. Flowroute and Skyetel are both legal carriers, but we have different classifications in the "Carrier" bucket. Flowroute is a CLEC and Skyetel is an IVP (Interconnected VoIP Provider). Both allow us to do the same thing, but the numbering authority IVPs have weren't available when Flowroute became a CLEC and at the time it was their only option. I suspect that if Flowroute was reviewing their regulatory options today, they would have have chosen the IVP + NA (numbering authority) instead of CLEC (this is what Telynx did). However, I am again speculating. They may have had other reasons for pursuing a CLEC license at the time that I don't know about.

In terms of the outage minimization - we have different philosophies on how best to do it. Those get crazy detailed and specific lol. A fundamental architecture summary I can give is this: Skyetel prefers Multi-Primary to Primary/Failover. The simple explanation here is that it takes much more for our backend architecture to fail (because all of our datacenters and interconnects need to fail at the same time and they are all active), but if a situation does present itself where everything does fail, it would take us longer to recover and it would be a total outage. Flowroute's architecture will cause them to fail more frequently, but recover more quickly; also they are more prone to regional issues rather than network-wide ones. Both have their pros & cons.

To give credit where credit is due - Flowroute's architecture is excellent. I obviously think our network is better, but Flowroute is one of the carriers we have a lot of respect for.

Hey @fuznutz04

I'll let you fork this if it gets too crazy - I don't want to clutter the board if this is a sufficient answer :).

The short answer is features and rates. While Flowroute is regarded as one of the very best telecom carriers, they have fewer features than we do. (This is probably because they always intended to be bought by a regular telco and didn't want to complicate their core business - but this is me speculating and I could be wrong). To name a few features we offer that they don't: Voicemail Transcription, Spam Call Prevention, Fax to Email, Call Recording, and PBX Health monitoring (My Favorite Feature!).

Our retail pricing is also lower and our relationship pricing is much lower. We also don't have a lot of the volume requirements that they do to get into the more aggressive pricing (we do have other requirements detailed here: https://mangolassi.it/topic/19453/skyetel-relationship-pricing)

I'd also say our support and porting is better, but those are subjective and I'm obviously biased

Another really common type of Fraud is actually Inbound. Some companies will actually pay people to deliver calls to Toll Free numbers. (This is because Toll Free carriers give kickbacks to the parties who send calls to them). This makes it so that if a party calls a Toll Free number, they'll get a (very very small) per-min kickback. If they call enough Toll Free numbers and keep them on the line for a long time, they can make a lot of money.

So if you have any Toll Free numbers, make sure they go to an IVR or a Voicemail box that has a timeout :).

@scottalanmiller said in FreePBX hardening ...:

@Dashrender said in FreePBX hardening ...:

@scottalanmiller said in FreePBX hardening ...:

@marcinozga said in FreePBX hardening ...:

@IRJ The scenario described above doesn't look like automated attack, and it's rather unlikely bots would be exploiting PBX to make international calls.

Actually that's exactly what is done. Bots setting up calls.

I'm curious - to what end? what's the benefit to them?

It's big money. Huge money. If you hack a phone system and get free calling to high cost places, then sell that to people making calls at low rates, you can undercut other phone carriers, and pay nothing. So the profit on it is huge.

Imagine being able to run a whole phone company, at essentially zero cost.

Or sell illegal calling cards. Thats really common too.

@Dashrender said in FreePBX hardening ...:

@scottalanmiller said in FreePBX hardening ...:

@marcinozga said in FreePBX hardening ...:

@IRJ The scenario described above doesn't look like automated attack, and it's rather unlikely bots would be exploiting PBX to make international calls.

Actually that's exactly what is done. Bots setting up calls.

I'm curious - to what end? what's the benefit to them?

Typically bots will call international Toll Free numbers where fraudsters can charge insanely high per-min rates. Toll Fraud (its official name) can be insanely expensive (like $100k phone bill expensive). We are pretty insane with our fraud prevention to avoid this.

Edit - we describe the kinds of fraud we've seen here: https://skyetel.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SUG/pages/243761174/High+Cost+Calling
It also describes how our fraud prevention works.

@JaredBusch said in Skyetel's Spring Update:

@Skyetel give me an API to upload my own recorded calls for transcription. Or an email to send them to. I don’t want all calls on any phone number transcribed.

Currently only a few users want voicemails transcribed.

I’m using a service (Nexiwave) for that now, where I have to email the wav file.

Edit: new features are good. Didn’t mention that.

Thanks @JaredBusch

For Voicemail Transcription, we actually offer that as a separate feature entirely:
https://skyetel.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SUG/pages/67174401/Voicemail+Transcription
You can access it here:
https://login.skyetel.com/#voicemail-transcription
(Depending on your voicemail volume, we might be cheaper than Nexiwave)

We didn't think about an email -> call transcription idea. I'll suggest it for you to our development team

Hey Guys - we just announced our Spring Update. This update is the largest update in our history.

Check out the details here:
https://skyetel.com/skyetel-spring-update/

@Skyetel said in Exploring VitalPBX:

@JaredBusch said in Exploring VitalPBX:

@Skyetel said in Exploring VitalPBX:

We're very fond of VitalPBX. Take this with a grain of salt - but VitalPBX generates a very low number of support requests when compared to other PBXs. We tend to view that as a good indicator of how well the system works and how easy it is to administer.

Grain of salt indeed. How are you calculating that? This is a solution with a tiny fraction of the current market. Low number of requests are easily just because there are fewer people installing it. Also because it is typically the more technical people trialing things, they also need less help.

We calculate it per capita to account for the imbalance. We don't have a ton of VitalPBXs on our network, but enough to have an opinion. Its not hard science, hence the "grain of salt," but we do keep up with what systems work better than others. (Its a big part of how our relationship pricing works)

I should add - VitalPBX might surprise you with how popular it is. It's also growing really really fast. Vital is definitely well beyond a "tiny fraction." They're just not a major player... yet.

@JaredBusch said in Exploring VitalPBX:

@Skyetel said in Exploring VitalPBX:

We're very fond of VitalPBX. Take this with a grain of salt - but VitalPBX generates a very low number of support requests when compared to other PBXs. We tend to view that as a good indicator of how well the system works and how easy it is to administer.

Grain of salt indeed. How are you calculating that? This is a solution with a tiny fraction of the current market. Low number of requests are easily just because there are fewer people installing it. Also because it is typically the more technical people trialing things, they also need less help.

We calculate it per capita to account for the imbalance. We don't have a ton of VitalPBXs on our network, but enough to have an opinion. Its not hard science, hence the "grain of salt," but we do keep up with what systems work better than others. (Its a big part of how our relationship pricing works)

We're very fond of VitalPBX. Take this with a grain of salt - but VitalPBX generates a very low number of support requests when compared to other PBXs. We tend to view that as a good indicator of how well the system works and how easy it is to administer.

I'm definitely not the expert on repos - but I know that our development team is madly in love with Bitbucket's code pipelines. https://bitbucket.org/product/features/pipelines

Please don't ask me many more questions about it

It also integrates beautifully with Slack which I love

We use Bitbucket and love it. http://bitbucket.org