I was wondering how you all deal with customers who get there own VOIP service?
Do you allow it? Charge more?
Especially when they start complaining about the call quality.
Interested to hear your thoughts.
Thanks
We used to offer our own. It was a nightmare. VOIP+Wisps tend to not mix to well in my experience.
If they complain about call quality, typically we suggest they upgrade to a higher speed package. As well as change DSCP on the sm to give priority to code point 46. For higher paying customers we will set a high priority queue of 80k up/down.
No issues with Voip here. As stated, run the correct DSCP configuration and make sure the core is also compliant.
We currently arent VOIP friendly on our alvarion network, we make a voip disclaimer at install that we make no guarantee of voip quality, and voip failure is not a valid contract terminator without the termination fee.
On the canopy network we still make no guarantee, but we tell them that it will probably work. If an alvarion customer complains, we do standard troubleshooting for issues, but if that checks out tough luck, the canopy network we will look a little deeper into.
Voip is a bad deal to guarantee if you dont control both the network and the VOIP service itself. Like magic jack, it was a miracle when it first came out, it worked for everybody, even our alvarion customers, but now that the magicjack network is saturated the quality has gone to hell in a bucket. Since they dont have any real tech support, who do you think gets the call? Us. Luckily we dont guarantee VOIP.
We can up QoS through the network but the reality is that VoIP QoS starts at the customer’s LAN. They need to have a QoS router and have it set up correctly for us to support it upstream. 90% of the time if they have QoS set up right at their end they don’t have any problems.
A single VoIP call can take up to 96kbps depending on the provider and how it’s set up. It takes a decent upstream connection to allow the QoS router enough bandwidth to prioritize VoIP and have enough upstream left over for other applications. I can’t see VoIP working on anything less than a 512k upstream connection.
Thanks all,
Our problem is we just don’t have enough bandwidth to be able to offer that service right now. That’s funny thatoneguysteve that you bring up “magic jack”. The day you posted that I did a install where the people were all excited to use their “magic jack”. I had no idea what it was!
That spurred me into action to get my contract updated/revised to make our customers that poor VOIP service is not a valid contract termintor.
Thanks
If they have a router, make sure the ports are forwarded for their phone (e.g. Vonage, ViaTalk, etc.). We’ve found that it DOES make a difference on our network. You can get the port information from www.portforward.com --> look-up the end user’s router --> select the end user’s VoIP provider --> add the single port and/or port range in the end user’s router.
We also enable the “Hi Priority Channel” on the SM (Configuration --> Quality of Service (QoS) --> CIR Bandwidth Settings, Hi Priority Channel (enable) --> set Hi Priority Uplink/Downlink CIR to 200 kbps. NOTE: If you use Prizm to manage bandwidth settings, skip the SM “Hi Priority Channel” setup and do it in Prizm.
We’ve been offering VoIP on Canopy for years.
We turn on QoS for our own VoIP customers and set the markers to match.
It’s a little complicated since the DSCP markers are 2 bits less than the ToS field that you typically see in software.
It works quite well in most cases, unless the connections are marginal.