Review by MaineMike 
UPDATED: 85 days ago
member for 5.4 years, 33 visits, last login: 12 days ago
 Portland,Cumberland,ME
 Contract price not specified.
 about 4 days
 "GREAT website. Fax-to-email feature."
 "Required some extra configuration."
 "Definitely a top contender."
| Web-site:
Ease of Installation:
Call Quality:
Reliability:
Tech Support:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
|
I have an Asterisk 1.6 PBX running at my home. I had been using a Vonage soft-phone account for over three years, but wanted to switch to a provider that supports BYOD on my primary number.
I tried these four providers: AxVoice, CallCentric, Future-Nine, and Voip.ms.
I thought that all four had similar call quality.
CallCentric definitely has the best website. When you log on to the website, the first screen is a dashboard that shows a lot of information in a very organized fashion. Some of the information included is account info, balance, device registration status, some basic preferences, the last few calls made, the last few calls received, fax info, E911 address, and active services. When I placed a technical support request, the request showed up also. I really, really liked the website. When ordering a DID number, I was only able to choose the city and didn’t see the phone number until after I placed my order.
CallCentric has a service that will receive a fax and email it to me. I thought that was a great idea.
A phone number in my city was not in stock, so it took four days to get one.
CallCentric does support E911 in my area. They support CNAM inbound, but not outbound.
They invoice on a monthly basis. When I signed up, I paid for one month plus the pro-rated amount for the second month to get me on a “first of the month” monthly schedule. I can use the website to determine if monthly invoices are charged to my credit card or deducted from my balance.
In order to configure a service provider in Asterisk, I have to add a "register" statement and a peer section to my sip.conf file for that provider. I also have to modify my extensions.conf file to determine how inbound calls should be handled. I did this for each of the service providers that I used. For the other service providers, I made a few additional minor changes to my configuration and I was able to get everything working pretty quickly. That wasn’t true for CallCentric.
I was unable to receive inbound calls from CallCentric. Unlike the other service providers, inbound calls from CallCentric come from a server other than the one listed in the "register" statement and peer section of my sip.conf file. When CallCentric was trying to establish an inbound call, Asterisk could not determine which peer was sending the INVITE, so the call was considered a "guest" call. In an attempt to make my Asterisk as secure as possible I had previously set "allowguest=no" in my sip.conf file (which is not the default setting). Once I realized that the CallCentric calls were being considered guest calls, I changed my sip.conf file to "allowguest=yes" and I was able to get a little bit further.
I didn’t know what to do next, so I opened up a trouble ticket. I was surprised to receive an answer very quickly. I was told to add "session-timers=refuse" to the "[general ]" section of my sip.conf file. That fixed the problem and inbound calls worked!
I tried moving that line to the CallCentric peer section of my sip.conf file, but realized that it had to remain in the general section since inbound calls were being considered guest calls. One side effect is that this setting was then applied to all my other sip peers, which I didn’t like. I also didn’t like having to have "allowguest=yes".
At the end of my evaluation, I was deciding between CallCentric and VoIP.ms. CallCentric has a better website and fax support, but requires Asterisk settings that I didn’t like. VoIP.ms supports outbound CNAM. I decided to choose VoIP.ms primarily because I wanted outbound CNAM support.
Followup comments: | Forums » comments on review of Callcentric |
|
Callcentric
(27)
·