Going to Dark Side....Well Maybe Gray - Hosted Aretta PBX

[slickrock22]

I have been an on premise Asterisk guy since I started fooling around with A@H 2.5. It has been an awesome ride. A few hardware glitches here and there and my end users asking for support while I am thousands of miles away on the beach in Costa Rica has finally pushed me over the edge. I have decided to go with a Hosted PBX solution. The tough choice was who do I go with. I spoke with 3 or 4 seemingly reputable companies like Bandwidth.com, a few local guys, Lylix, Aretta, Apptix, etc. The issues were things like not enough support for PBX config, no end user assistance via support, requirement for an on premise router to which all remote phones had to connect (single point of failure with residential grade internet bot a great idea), expensive per extension fees (we like to give staff an on premise phone as well as one at home). Probably a few more just cant remember.

I finally pulled the trigger last week on Aretta. I spoke with Marc at Aretta and he seemed knowledgeable and had a sense that he knew what he was talking about. Aretta has a good blend of a full PBXIAF implementation, Multi channel SIP channels managed internally, support for ends users, ability to buy fully supported handsets and so far what seems to be fair pricing. A big plus on top of all of that was that is seems they have the backing of Ward and crew. That to me was a big deal after having been truly blown away by the contribution of the PBXIAF team!

One of my biggest concerns of course are call quality. I am moving from safe PRI copper to SIP over the Internet. Now you need to know that 90% of our staff are remote around the US so it's not like instead of pointing to Chicago now pointing to Atlanta should cause much problem. Also I assumed since Aretta is procuring the SIP trunks that they would do whatever needed to ensure trunk quality. Having a fully supported off site PBX was worth the risk. This is officially my last piece of server equipment on premise.

I began porting the DID from my PRI provider to Aretta last week. They took the initiative and SSH'ed into my on premise box and created an IAX trunk between my provisioned Aretta NetPBX box and my existing On-Premise PBX. At there suggestion they changed my extension to connect to the Aretta NetPBX and kept all other users connected to my esiting on premise PBXIAF. This will serve for me to test out the new NetPBX in production until my DIDs are ported. This should create a near seemles transition upon DID porting. I cant say I have ever had a near seemless port when chaging phone systems or telco providers. We will wait to see if this is truly seemless.

To say the least I am very fired up about this change. I think for my type of company with more external then internal users, and a PBX admin that travels frequently, this is a no brainer.

I will keep everyone up to date as my transition progresses over the next few weeks. One thing I will be paying very close attention to is call quality both between extensions and over the SIP trunks.

I hope and pray this was not a mistake as my end users will hang me if this does not work.

Stay tuned,

Ryan

 

[drmurdoch]

Exciting ! Good luck.

 

[wardmundy]

You picked a great company with lots of depth. They do a lot for the VoIP community, and they'll make it work and will be there when something comes unglued. That plus all the things you mention really do make it a "no-brainer" for companies like yours. Good luck and keep us posted.

 

[slickrock22]

I am now about a month in and still waiting for the majority of my DIDs to be ported over to Aretta without a port date (mildly irritating). The 800 lines were ported separately from my standard DID numbers. You can image what a surprise that was when I found out that I would be running 2 pbxs(1 at Aretta for my 800s, while still maintaining my on premise PBXIAF). Not ideal and could have been scheduled better but I could work around so it was not catastrophic because in the beginning Aretta provisioned a IAX trunk between my On Premise PBXIAF. To really report on performance I am going to need to wait until all of DIDs ported over. I have had 2 instances where my phones were not able to connect to my Aretta PBX. A quick call to Aretta and a they suggested a reboot of the PBX which resolved the issues. I have been struggling with missing MOH that I believe is 50% resolved (works on extension but not queues) I changed the ticket from High Priority to Critical last Friday and communication on the issue via tickets and call backs have been spotty at best.

So far I would say that need some work on Ticket management and improved procedural approaches to standard client needs. I will report back more one we are up and running in production with other staff.

Things that Aretta has done well:
Sales
Provisioning of PBX
Portal
Tech Support Staff
Technical Knowledge of Asterisk

Things that Aretta has NOT done well:
Setting expectations on DID portings
Separately porting 800 numbers from other lines
Not communicating effectively on Critical Support tickets
Issues with PBX freezing and needing reboot
Single shared t*f*t*p server for all clients

I will keep everyone in the loop as my experience unfolds with Aretta. So far I am optimistic that some of the initial glitches will be ironed out. The real test is when we are using across the entire company once the DIDs are ported. I am not sure I could recommend this to anyone outside of this forum as it seems you still need a technical contact on my side to interact with Aretta. Ideally it would become more turn key so that a company without technical knowledge could implement.

Since I am in the Customer Experience Management business I will have to provide "I recommend" or "I do not recommend" after a few months of usage. Stay tuned.

 

[w1ve]

It will be interesting to see your results.

I have a vps PIAF hosted at synapseglobal.com... I liked the price.
I've been there for almost a year. Service/Support has been excellent. Tickets are answered in a timely manner.

They do sell DIDs, however, I'd rather be in control. So, I buy my PSTN connectivity (IAX) from voip.ms. My PBX is in synapseGlobals's LA Data Center, and voip.ms has an LA POP; I'm wondering if it is in the same facility, as I consistently get 2mS ping times to voip.ms.

Aretta are great folks, and they contribute much to the Asterisk community -- I just wanted to offer an opinion on another alternative.

The reliability of SynapseGlobal has been very close to 5 9's...

(I use Vitelity as my backup provider; I have had them for 3 years. Quality has degraded over time and tech support has issues... However, their toll free prices remain among the best.)

FWIW YMMV

Gerry

 

[mfribush]

Ryan,
Thanks for the feedback on your experience. I wanted to chime in regarding some of the items you mentioned as things that have gone "not so well"...

Porting...
Porting is a nightmare, period. It is the most painful, manual process we have, and dealing with our carriers is something that we would prefer not to do, however a necessary evil. Our issue is that unless CLEARLY stated at the time of our port documentation submission, our carriers always, without question, go into the system and select the 'first available date' for porting. This always leads to problems when there are multiple port requests as is the case when mixing TF and local lines. We should have 'assumed' that this is what you wanted, and is something our porting people are being trained to spot when submissions come in. The problem we have is that there are so many port requests coming in on a daily basis, it is sometimes hard for those guys to keep up merely feeding them in the hopper to our carrier. We did discount the port fee for you, and we always offer to forward numbers for you back to the old system via our online portal until the other numbers cut. But since we installed the IAX trunk between your premise box, this really wasn't necessary in your case.

Critical Tickets...
Our policy surrounding critical tickets is documented and limited to hard down issues only with inbound or outbound calling. The critical status that you put in was for a ticket related to music on hold. While yes, that is important, it was taken by the techs to be a 'non hard-down' situation. When you escalated it to me, I personally had our lead engineers get involved.

Your system...
When we first spoke back in August, you wanted to get a quick test account of our system. I had just finished testing our completely new 64 bit platform and was able to spin a new hosted Asterisk server free trial for you before your eyes in 60 seconds. We then upgraded you to our new PRO platform, which was in its first month of operation. There were a few minor issues earlier this month that have been resolved. Because of your positive experience on the free platform, it was a judgement call on my part to put you on the new platform. Looking back, I probably should have held off and provisioned the server on our older platform which has been running for 2 years. I thought in my mind that since you were an existing PiAF user, you would be enthusiastic about the new feature set and interface. FYI - our typical customer is a non-tech-savvy business where they buy new pre-configured Polycoms and everything works out of the box, as opposed to a premise PiAF migration with interbox IAX trunking. We limit that that to cases where the customer knows what they are doing.

Single shared t*f*t*p...
This is a legacy issue for us and not a problem for the majority of our customers, but then again most of our customers just want the phone to work and don't care about 'how it works'. The right way to do it is to integrate the awesome Endpoint Configuration Manager that John Mullinix, Ed Macri and others put together a few months back. That is on tap for an October release into our new platform which should get all the configs on your hosted instance...

Our company...
I really appreciate the kind words of the things that we do well. We pride ourselves on customer service, customer communication and will do whatever it takes to make sure our customers are happy with their service. I think it's a rarity these days to actually be able to get ahold of anyone on the phone inside a VoIP company, much less knowledgeable people. We only hire people who 'know what they are doing' and they're hard to find. We stand behind our customers and are always there when you call us. If you ever have a problem with support response, you can always escalate it up to the executive team for immediate action, as you have seen in your emails to me.

I want to thank you again for being a customer and look forward to earning your continued business.

 

[slickrock22]

Marc,

Makes sense on the Polycoms as far as Turn Key. Thanks for the follow up and more than anything I think the direction of companies like Aretta is the wave of the future as people outsource non Core activities. I would just like to keep my brethren informed in these forum from someone that truly does not have any other agenda aside from sharing an experience of transition from on premise to off premise.

 

[slickrock22]

HOLY COW....we are 100% live on Aretta!!! This morning at 10:30am the Porting of our DID went through. Marc at Aretta called in a few favors at Level 3 and got a quick port date. Thanks Marc!!

So far, so good. More to come at the end of next week on our experience!

 

[slickrock22]

I wanted to report back that I have been active with my ported DIDs from about 1 month now. After some of the initial issues were resolved with Aretta I have been extremely happy and can recommend their offering. I now officially do not have single piece of server equipment at my office. The PBX was the final machine. I would not recommend this if you are still in the tweaking stage of your PBXIAF journey as it is just as easy to have a local on premise box if you want to play around.

If you have a majority of remote users this is a great solution or if you want out of the admin business.

 

[ghurty]

Just wondering:
When using a hosting PBX provider like Aretta, do you lose out anything? Are you able to write completely custom dialplans etc..?

Also, doesn't it end up (long term) costing more? For example, the NetPBX16 all owes a maximum of 16 simultaneous calls for 499.95. Which ends up being 31.25 per channel. There are providers that sell unlimited channels for less that.

Thanks