I was a Telasip customer for about 2 years. My account was set to automatically deduct from my bank account. At some point, I received a new debit card and my payments stopped going through. That in itself was no big deal, it could have been easily fixed. But Telasip NEVER informed me that my payments weren't going through.

Recently I received a cancellation notice from them and I didn't understand how there could be a problem since my bill was set for automatic payment. That is when they told me that my bill had not been paid for over a year and I owed them $220.

So instead of informing me of the problem when it first occurred, they never said anything to me. They left my service intact and just let the charges pile up on me for over a year. When I voiced my displeasure that they had not informed me of any problems with my billing, they promptly canceled my service and sent me to collections, without ever invoicing me or informing me that my payments were past due.

If they don't inform you of a problem with your automatic payment, how will you ever know to fix it? At the very least they could have shut off my service when I was a month past due and then I would have realized there was a problem and been able to remedy the situation when I only owed $15. But they chose to REALLY screw me over. They never even let me know there was a problem and they just allowed my service to keep adding up. Then to add insult to injury, they promptly sent me to collections. As far as I am concerned this was more their fault than mine, since they never even informed me of a problem. It would be different if it were a check that I made out every month. But this was an automatic payment that just kept piling up as it went unpaid and I had no idea about it.

Horrible business practices and unethical billing practices. They are too unprofessional for you. Stay away from these fly-by-night clowns.

I've only had Telasip service for the last week, but so far I'm happy with the product, pricing and service. I do wish they would allow a second line and just monitor the soft limit for abuse, but that's my only real complaint. The call quality is very good - I think that the PSTN itself is the limiting factor.

I've had two technical support issues and they have been dealt with lightning fast. The first issue involved the trunk configuration for Asterisk. There's some conflicting configurations on this site and others, so I asked Telasip directly. About 15 minutes later, I had a concise answer:

Outgoing Peer Details:
  context=from-pstn
  host=gw4.telasip.com
  insecure=very
  qualify=yes
  secret=<munged>
  sendrpid=yes
  type=peer
  username=<munged>

Incoming Peer Details:
  Leave completely blank

Registration String: <yourusername>:<yourpassword>@gw4.telasip.com

Be very careful that you spell Telasip with an "A" in the middle. Telesip is a completely different company and it's very easy to confuse the two (trust me).

The second issue involved the called party not hearing any audio on outbound calls (Asterisk -> Telasip -> PSTN). After spending a few hours troubleshooting things on my end, I sent an e-mail. About 30 minutes later, I got a response and the problem was resolved: Telasip disabled reinvites on their gateway. That fixed it!

Whomever is answering the support requests doesn't waste any words on pleasantries, but the responses have been fast and the answers accurate. If I had to choose between "warm and fuzzy" or "fast and accurate", I'll take the latter anyday.

Specifically does NOT permit three-way calling, as this requires two channels, and they no longer permit two channels. Note that this only applies to Asterisk users, apparently, so they are now decidedly NOT asterisk friendly. Use Asterisk, and they assume you are going to abuse their service, so they curtail what they offer you.

> Our plans are priced per line. When we allowed the second outbound channel,
> we found many customers who abused our service. The usage for these
> customers far exceeded average residential usage.
>
> We were forced to make a decision. Do we limit the number of outbound
> channels and allow unlimited usage on our lines, or do we allow multiple
> channels and limit the usage.
>
> We made the decision to limit the outbound channels. You have to understand
> we pay for the service on a per minute basis.

And here I had thought I had found my new provider, in *spite* of the fact that they have no local numbers in my area (which they make NO means to check before you order) and I had to obtain a DID seperately elsewhere. I guess I'll be going shopping again.

Customer service is very erratic - sometimes good (I can call and get right through, or get a timely response to an email), sometimes very bad (No response at all to email, no answer or not even a ring at any of the published phone numbers).

A prior comment notes they were 'having trouble' with a 'user portal' - the comment is dated May 05 - over a year ago. They still don't have one, apparently they decided it wasnt worth it? Still no way to choose a phone number prior to paying, still lots of missing info on their site.

Summary: When it works, it works well enough. But they need to improve communication with customers, and provide more information to both potential and existing customers, as well as a reliable way to contact them when there is a problem.

What Antonio Cabrera failed to mention in his post is that he was using the residential plan for an internet cafe. He had 10 softphones connected to his asterisk box and was selling US calling. We do not have terms of service on our web-ste. We admit that. However, Residential plans are for Residential use. If you are a business planning on signing up for a residential plan, please do not signup.

--Telasip

this is what I got from them , I have then service for 3 months runing in my asterisk server , never got my did number, never answer my mails, and finally they charged me 77.47 dlls plus my regular payments
and this is what i got

---

From: jimmy gonzalez mailto:ingjimmy230@hotmail.com
Sent: Friday, March 17, 2006 9:02 PM
To: gwillingham@telasip.com
Cc: gwillingham@telasip.com; jhuguely@telasip.com; support@telasip.com
Subject: all circuits are bussy now problem please help

Hi, my name is Antonio Cabrera i have the service for 3 months now but I
have two problems, I havent get my did number and since two days ago all I
get is all circuits are busy now please tray your call later, can you
plaese answer my mails i sent many before but no one answer me


Thanks


Antonio Cabrera

After reviewing this account we have disabled your account. You have used
11530 minutes outbound in the last 3.5 months. This does not appear to be a
residential usage. There are too many different caller id names to be one
home. We have a soft limit of 2000 minutes a month so the amount owed is

December 3044 - 2000 - 1044 @ .02 cents/minute
January 3956 - 2000 = 1956 @ .02 cents/minute
February 2873 - 2000 = 873 @ .02 cents/minute

Total $77.46

We don't allow residential service to be used in this manner. You can move
to a play per minute plan -

Either:
$100 minimum
1.2 cents/ minute
$1.00 per DID

OR:
$40 minimum
2.0 cents/minute
1.95 per DID

---

From: Ing. Jaime Gonzalez T. mailto:ingjimmy230@hotmail.com
Sent: Monday, March 20, 2006 12:37 PM
To: Support

(Caveat: I'm by no means a VOIP expert. Have Asterisk@Home running and sort of working.) Signed up for TelaShip Premium account and within a couple of hours received an emial back with the signin info. Followed <a href="http://mundy.org/blog/index.php?p=71">these instructions</a> and had it running within minutes. Outbound call quality so far has been great - better than cell phone anyway. Still waiting on my DID, then I'll be able to test inbound calls also. I'll edit this post as I progress.

Added Jan 20: I've been using telasip for 3 months now and still very pleased. Yes, the website needs work(!), but support has been great. I would suggest that this is not a service for a complete newcomer, but if you're not in a rush (DID's can take 1-2 weeks) and can tweak most settings yourself, they provide a reliable clear service.

Was considering this service, until I found links broken on their website, no published terms of service, and no response to email.

Does anyone have info on how long they're been in business, or a link to a forum/mailing list with info on their status?

The TelaSIP site does not explain how a local telephone number would be added to their service. Any ideas? How would this differ from Vonage's service or Verizons service in that regard.

Thanks,

-CHristian

Excellent support. Replied to every email i sent them within 5 minutes.

The coverage area is not accurate on their website.

I almost ignored them but i thought i'd email and ask since they support multiple incoming calls. I'm in kentucky and even thou their website says that they dont have any coverage there, they do.. (:biggrin:)