[Discuss] VOIP provider

[tmetro+blu at gmail.com (Tom Metro)]

Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
> I use callcentric, and I'm happy with them and recommend them.

I use Callcentric as well, but not for anything important, and I can not
recommend them.

I like their feature set, technical quality of the service, and even
support, when they aren't distracted.

But last fall a series of DDoS attacks followed by hurricane Sandy
knocking their data center offline, resulting days (between both it
seemed like weeks) of downtime, showed what an amateur operation it
actually is.

http://blog.voipdiy.com/2012/10/hurricane-sandy-knocks-out-callcentric.html

There's a very long thread on DSLreports covering the Sandy outage at
Callcentric:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r27591360-CallCentric-tech-issues-today-

Some shorter bits of it, starting with an employee response to the outage:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r27673234-

and post-outage discussion:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,27683900
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,27697281

Really? No backup data center? No disaster recovery plan? No
communication during the outage?

The more troubling bit is that they're probably typical for most VoIP
providers, and as a consumer on the outside with nothing but a
provider's marketing to go on, it is extremely difficult to separate the
providers that have a few rented racks in some data center and those
that are running an actual carrier-grade operation.

(Supposedly Callcentric was more like a carrier, in that they actually
had their own POTS gateway hardware, which physically tied them to the
single NYC location. Yet competitors, like voip.ms, that outsourced the
gateway part, had far more distributed and redundant infrastructure.)

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/