OBI 202 GV CC Success, but...
SteveInWA:
Quote from: Kman609 on September 20, 2014, 06:20:45 pm
Ok now this sucks. Glad I read the porting FAQs at CC. While I can port our number to Callcentric, it is useable for INBOUND calls only. Ported numbers cannot be used with any of their outbound products. What the hell? Am I reading this wrong?
You're reading it wrong.
Traditional wireline (POTS) phone companies used to lease you an analog pair of phone wires, connected to a telco central office, that could make and receive calls over the Public Switched Telephone Network for some monthly fee. The early consumer-targeted VoIP providers, like Vonage, emulated that model for marketing purposes. However, with internet telephony service providers (ITSPs), the inbound and outbound calling services are actually accomplished separately. Your inbound phone number "terminates" from the PSTN on a telephone carrier's switch, where it then uses SIP to contact your ATA. Outbound calls go from your ATA to the ITSP's SIP equipment, which then goes out via various "transit carriers" depending on each ITSP's magic mix of low-cost vs. call quality. Those calls eventually re-enter the PSTN to ring the other party's phone, or can connect directly to other IP telephony equipment.
CC (and several of their competitors) describe, price, and let you use inbound services separately from outbound services, "a la carte". So: you'd port your phone number to CC, where they'd host it as a SIP DID number. You then subscribe to whatever inbound rate plan you wish (by-the-minute, or some bucket of minutes or "unlimited" minutes, etc.) By default, you are also now enrolled in their per-minute outbound calling plan. That means, you can make outbound calls on your SIP ATA (OBi), billed to your account. Those calls will either show your DID number's caller ID, or you can actually verify and use some other number's caller ID if you wish. If you decide you like the service, you can upgrade or downgrade your outbound minutes plan accordingly. For example, I used per-minute billing for a while, with the $1.50/month E911 service added on, and then I upgraded to their $6.95/month plan, which includes 500 minutes and E911 (no extra $1.50 fee).
Does that make more sense now? If not, I'll try again.
Kman609:
Ok that makes more sense. I just got blown away on their FAQs where it said:
You will not be able to port your number to the following services:
Dirt Cheap DID
Free Phone Number
Outbound products
Just to be clear for this computer savvy, but phone lingo ignoramus: If I port my Verizon number to CC and subscribe to the pay-per-minute plan, will people I call see my ported number on their CID?
Thank you for your help.
My daughter went to MIT, not me LOL.
SteveInWA:
Ha ha ha, I went to Berkeley, not MIT, so draw your own conclusions. :P
Yah, CC's descriptive language could be better in that example. What they mean: they offer some inbound products that are either free, or at an extremely low price, and they don't want to host ported-in numbers on those lines of service. And, again, because it is not intuitively obvious to the new SIP VoIP user, they're simply telling you "hey, dummy, we sell outbound calling by the minute or by the bucket, but it's OUTbound, so you need to buy INbound calling services for a ported number". This isn't any different from a DID phone number they issue to you directly. DID service is an inbound product.
If you port your Verizon number to their service, and you also sign up for outbound service (e.g. pay-per-minute), then, by default, your callers will see your formerly-Verizon-now-CC phone number on their caller ID display.
Optionally, if you have some other phone number, like a mobile phone, that you prefer people use to contact you, you could arrange with CC to send that caller ID instead of your Verizon number's ID. The procedure for this involves you opening a support ticket, then placing a call from the desired phone number to a toll-free number at CC. Toll free numbers are more immune to illegal caller ID manipulation (spoofing), so it's a reasonably good verification that you do have the right to use your phone number (you're not trying to spoof some other customer's number). After they verify your other number, they add it to your account as a selectable caller ID. You can swap them at will.
Kman609:
Thank you for your patience. We're going to dump GV, and go with CC for both inbound and outbound calls for a week or so to test it to see if it meets our needs--basic phone service while blocking the incessant scammers. If all goes well, we'll port our Verizon number over.
It might take some patience from (legitimate) people calling our Verizon number, since the latency is pretty frustrating sometimes. But it's just a temporary thing, as I believe the latency is coming from the Verizon call-forwarding feature. If someone calls our free CC New York number, there is hardly any delay at all, and the sound quality is very good.
Now I have to figure out how to eradicate GV from the OBI and add outbound calling to CC. Something for another day...
Thanks again.
PS One of my best friends went to law school at Berzerkeley. We just don't talk politics ;).
dudly:
Kman609, I had almost the exact setup you have, except for the verizon. I used CC initially for inbound and outbound calls, along with E911 but have since switched over to CircleNet for all outbound calls (they are not free, but almost). For the last 4 or so months the Telemarketer block has eliminated all robo spam calls. If a real voice spammer actually gets through, I just use the Call Treatments to ban them. It also works great now that we are into the election period with mass spam politicking. Besides my main number that I ported over to CC I also have 2 extra free CC lines with NY area codes. One of them is used for a dedicated CC inbound fax to email line that has worked perfectly so far. I kept my Google Voice number on the Obi and use it occasionally. So on my Obi, I can do inbound/outbound on 1 CC lines, 1 outbound only Circlenet line (dedicated for that), 1 inbound/outbound Google Voice line, and then have the dedicated fax line. On the Obi202 I plug in a second phone and use it mainly for inbound/outbound Google Voice calls, and can also do inbound/outbound calls on my extra CC free line. I could set it up with more features I suppose, but it is all I will ever need or use. CallCentric call treatments, once I learned how to use them, have been very versatile.
I have never had any latency or almost non existent with CC. I had a few issues with CircleNet, but emailed them and they fixed it immediately. I can't say enough about how great they were to help and work with me to get their outbound line working with no latency.
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