R.I.P. Fonica VoIP Service

[jroper]

Dear all

I am no longer involved in Fonicatec, FonicaPABX Fonicaprojects, or the Fonica VoIP service.

Mark of Fonicatec will continue to offer any support that maybe required, and he should be contacted through the normal channels.

As many of you know, I have an involvement in A2Billing and Star2Billing, the commercial arm of A2Billing, for a number of years, which due to its success is taking up more and more of my time, as well as creating the potential for a conflict of interest between Fonicatec and A2Billing, so a choice had to made. I chose A2Billing.

Yours

Joe

 

[merlyn]

Dear all

I am no longer involved in Fonicatec, FonicaPABX Fonicaprojects, or the Fonica VoIP service.

Mark of Fonicatec will continue to offer any support that maybe required, and he should be contacted through the normal channels.

As many of you know, I have an involvement in A2Billing and Star2Billing, the commercial arm of A2Billing, for a number of years, which due to its success is taking up more and more of my time, as well as creating the potential for a conflict of interest between Fonicatec and A2Billing, so a choice had to made. I chose A2Billing.

Yours

Joe

I am sorry to hear that Joe.
As a user of fonicatec (for all my outbound residential use) since soon after its start I always liked the thought of you being there to look over things.
But I understand your decision and think you made the right choice.

But then again I have been putting off doing my inevitable a2billing install. I will change focus and be glad you are there making sure a2billing is running smoothly.

thanks for all you do Joe

merlyn

 

[markiper]

best of luck Joe

I have to agree with Merlyn. I jump on the Fonicatec bandwagon at the early stages, and it is now used for all my outbound traffic in my home office, and my parents house.

I can only wish you the best in your future endeavors, and I hope that Mark and Fonicatec are kept at the same level of service (if not better) and that the level of support does not change from what I got from you on the few instances when problems were found (even phone conversations to try to determine what was causing the problem.)

Regards,
Markiper

 

[jroper]

Hi

Thank you both for your kind words.

Yours

Joe

 

[Alex728]

to put everyones mind at rest I also use Fonicatec and can confirm that Mark is providing a consistent level of service and quick response to problems..

bear in mind though that some things such as duff caller ID are caused by the actions of "big fish" especially former national telephone companies so the smaller VOIP players have to wait in line. (its not even just BT which mangles CLID, Telekom Malaysia can be equally bad, my mum sometimes got random CLID on her mobile from a local (Kuala Lumpur) number when I was clearly telephoning from England...

in these cases the country's Communications Ministry often has to get involved in negotiations as left to the market big players simply aren't going to help a commercial rival, they don't "have" to....

 

[drvcrash]

is Fonica still running ,i can still make calls but cant seem to add money to my account at all. I used to be able if I used IE but now that even fails

 

[kmcdaniel]

I use Vitelity for production systems, is Fonica the suggestion from all for backup trunks?

 

[wardmundy]

voip.ms has a huge following from our users, and they have lots of pops, cheap prices, and redundancy.

 

[kmcdaniel]

Thanks Ward! Is there a similar special piaf deal link, like vitelity has. Or just go to the site and sign up?

 

[wardmundy]

We don't have a relationship with them. Just know lots of us have liked their setup and the flexibility it offers to configure sub-accounts.

 

[kmcdaniel]

Thanks Ward! It seems as if they are further along than Vitelity. First impressions is voip.ms quality is excellent. I also like their user portal. Been having some issues with Vitelity lately. Is there any reason why one would not use voip.ms for primary production trunks for clients instead of vitelity?

 

[completetech]

how do I add money or check my balance? can not seem to get to the site

 

[gbh2o]

Fonica lives!

I have continued to use the PBXiaF service as originally setup. I had my second outage (in 4 years I think) and emailed Mark Trowbridge [ [email protected] ] to check on the situation.

FWIW, his response (below) does not sound to me like they will be cutting us off anytime soon and perhaps should even get Ward's notice as still available and worth promoting again:

Hi Greg,

Thank you for your kind words – especially after a few hours of unreliability!

Although we make a small loss on the PIAF service and PIAF don’t promote us (although they asked us to put the service together in the first place!), we have no intention to terminate the service, and are glad to be of service to clients like yourself. We actually use the servers for failover and secondary routes for some of our larger clients (eg. US State Dept., Shell Oil), so we are happy to cover the server and technical support costs and keep the PIAF service in place.

If you ever have problems with the PIAF links you can use www.fonicatec.com/login.html

Kind regards,
Mark

 

[wardmundy]

For the Record...

When the Fonica service was first begun, the understanding was that it would provide a source of revenue for the PIAF Project to keep the lights on. Here were Mark's own words: "my calculations show a 17-19% return to PIAF." Suffice it to say, his projections and his accounting methods were like two ships passing in the night. Not a dime ever has been contributed to the PBX in a Flash project. Other than continuing to provide them free DNS service, we gave up on Fonica long ago.

 

[andygee]

Does anyone know if they are still doing anything? Their system started refusing my outbound calls a month ago and I've not been able to get any response to their emails.

Thanks,

Andy