bandwidth.com

Dropped calls is becoming a curse with Vitelity.....looking at Bandwidth....price seems OK if it solves the QOS problems.

We have been with Bandwidth.com for over a month. We have NOT had a good experience so far as everyone else here seems to have had. It might be a unique situation with us, but this is the only experience I have personally witnessed with them.

We bought a Qwest T1 and 10 SIP channels with them. We had them port over our numbers including our Toll Free. We also bought an Edgemarc 4500 with one T1 port from them. The installation went OK. First came the T1 and they forgot to install the extended Dmarc. I had to call and they re-sent the phone provider out to setup the Dmarc. This worked out fine and was pretty painless.

Bandwidth.com messed up and screwed up on the shipment of our router. Qwest was completely online with our T1 for weeks before we got our router. This was especially frustrating as I had reminded our Bandwidth.com coordinator many times that the router needs to ship very soon. He was supposed to ship it overnight because of their delay, and he screwed up and sent it ground. Even more delay.

Anyway, the day we brought the router online and worked with provisioning was ok. The router didn't come pre-configured like they said it would. Good thing I have worked on these before and got the thing setup. We tested the T1 and then got our lines (SIP channels) provisioned. We didn't port our numbers yet because we wanted to see that the lines would be clean before moving forward. We had bought an extra 10 numbers when we bought this setup, so we used those for testing. Also, we routed all outbound calls over the new Bandwidth.com lines.

We did this for a week and everything seemed great. So I gave the green light for the porting process. What a mistake that was. The very next day we started to have audio quality issues. Our MOS scores were often times in the 1's and 2's. Just horrible sound. BTW, this problem hasn't been solved and this trouble ticket has been open with them for 4 weeks 3 days! They consider this a priority 1 ticket (since the beginning). At least their SLA says I get 50% off our bill.

Now for the porting. What a nightmare! They ported our local numbers before our toll free. This made our toll free go down! Thank goodness we have a stellar relationship with our old phone provider and they "lent" us a temporary account to re-route our toll free to a working number. It took bandwidth.com over a week to finally port our toll free after porting our local numbers!

To this day we can't place decent quality phone calls (good quality meaning MOS scores in the 3's and 4's) unless we pull ALL traffic off of their T1 besides voice (SIP). We do have our old T1 (the one bandwidth.com was replacing), so we have been able to make due. Though, until they can get a T1 working with only a dozen users browsing the web over it and also run SIP over that same connection (with good voice quality, ie. MOS scores in the 3's and 4's), we cannot recommend their services to anyone.

We regret going with Bandwidth.com and wish we went with Cbeyond.

Hi Scott.

As always - thank you for you help. I feel the same as you. The traffic shaping and prioritization isn't working like it should. Even Bandwidth.com agrees and I just replaced (a couple of days ago) our edgemarc with one that bandwidth.com sent as a replacement. As far as settings, SIP is auto-prioritized in the Edgemarc and we are using ALG. Also, we have traffic shaping set to 1300u/1400d (though we have tried lots of different settings before we swapped out the router).

Yesterday when working with Bandwidth.com they connected an SNMP monitor for a real time view of the problem. We would be on a call and they would ask me to download something big from the Internet (in this case I tried to download a ISO from Microsoft). The MOS scores would within seconds make their way down to 1's and 2's. Interesting enough, the BW.com tech noticed on his SNMP monitor that the traffic would flat line at the ceiling. He felt this was odd and so did I. We both agreed there should be more of a wavy pattern due to the shaping and prioritization. He gave the Edgemarc a reboot and we retried the tests. This time we were seeing MOS scores from 3.32 to 4.26. Also, the snmp graph wasn't flat, it was now wavy.

We are going to test this for the next few days and see what kind of results we find. But we might of found an issue with the traffic shaping where that the state stables (or something else), makes it so that the edgemarc requires a reboot for the new settings to work. This would clearly be a bug, and if it's true we will have to let edgewaternetworks know.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions.

To report back in on this (for those that are interested).

We continued to have further problems with even the new Edgemarc. After considerable time with tier3, they believed that the firmware on the new edgemarc had issues. We backed down to firmware 7.6.2 (we were on 7.6.13 I believe). This did make things better somewhat. Only until they changed the traffic shaping to 1400/1400 did things get a lot better.

It's been since last Friday night with these settings and things are a lot better. Though I am still unhappy with what seems to be the final result. Most of the time our calls are in the MOS 3's and 4's. Though sometimes we dip down in the 2's and 3's for a while. When in the 2's and/or low 3's there is a noticeable sound quality issue with our users. Our sound quality issues always seem to happen when our users are doing something on the net (like downloading the newest iTunes, or downloading some 10-15mb patches). I would be much happier that for normal day-to-day usage of the T1 that the calls would all fall into the MOS 3-4 range. My expectation is that only under extreme and lengthy load on the T1 should we have sound quality issues.

It looks like our expectations are not going to be met. Until Bandwidth.com can make it so that "normal" web browsing and Internet usage can coexist with their SIP service on the same T1 (while most of the time maintaining MOS scores of 3-4.4), we cannot recommend them to anyone.

Couple of reasons:

1) Their scheme of setting up your SIP trunks requires you to give them the IP address that your box is on (Public IP of the Router to be exact) - this is fine if things never change, and if your primary connection NEVER goes down - Out here in the Real World of Albuquerque, NM, we have fairly unreliable connections (It's Monsoon season here right now - violent daily thunder storms with LOTS of lightning) so every time you want to switch your boxes connection, you have to wade through tech support and have them change it on their end - not a quick-recovery scheme by any means. SIP Trunk registration is there for a reason - use it!

2) When they go down, they REALLY go down - out of the last 4 outages that they have had, ALL of our customers completely went down - which is REALLY a drag when you have 5 of your customers all lose their phones at the same time.

We found Voxitas and have been VERY happy with them - their site is here:

http://www.voxitas.com/

Greg

Joe -

You have experience with teliax, why don't you jump in and help that guy who can't get his teliax trunks up. He's having a helluva time.

Interesting development.

Bandwidth.com has really ramped up their support with us. They re-created our environment in their lab and can reproduce the problem! They are working with Edgewaternetworks to figure out what is going on.

While our situation has gone on MUCH too long, I have to give Bandwidth.com a lot of kudos for working this hard to resolve our issue. I feel confident they will figure it out now. I will update when things progress.

We recently started using bandwidth.com and have been fairly happy with them. I don't know yet if it has to do with our side however it does not sound 100% perfect as I believe it should. Again, this is my opinion and as far as my customers are concerned, they are satisfied.

Does anyone have issues where if there are loud sounds in the background the call on one end can 'mute', like if you were on speaker phone? I tend to notice that a lot...

That's it, they are not perfect, but they try and we have had few problems, it has been 5 months.

Nahtan

Well, almost a month later from my last post and we are still waiting. Right now they have concluded that their solution (bandwidth.com) doesn't work the way they have sold it before (when using Qwest). They need a QOS version of the Qwest service. They say that every Bandwidth.com client that is using Qwest is affected. When Bandwidth.com upgraded their LAB Qwest T1 with the Qwest QOS enabled T1, all voice quality issues go away. FYI, they discovered this a couple days after my last post.

I am completely disappointed right now with Bandwidth.com. They have had the solution to our problem for almost a month and they still have not implemented it.

I call/email them at least 5 times per week. I probably hear from them 4 times per month. I know it's a difficult problem, but 90 days is too long for any problem.

FYI. Still waiting on Bandwidth.com for a solution.

Good to hear