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Review by ChuckIL9 See Profile

  • Location: Peoria, Peoria, IL, USA
  • Cost Contract price not specified.
Reliable, friendly customer service, good selection of DID's, pay as you go, buy a package of minutes, or unlimited per/channel
Not the cheapest, geared toward those with Asterisk PBX, toll-free outbound has a per-minute charge
Hosted Asterisk with Termination/Origination Done Right
Web-site:
Ease of Installation:
Call Quality:
Reliability:
Tech Support:
Value for money:

24-Sep-10 update:

It's been about 2 years since my last update. Everything has been fine. Can't recall an outage since Sep. 2008. Configurable failover options have been implemented with failover to redundant trunks, and failover to PSTN.

20-Nov-08 update

Everything is working flawlessly after the switch failure fix. I only have 7 DID's from them, but the few users I have are generally happy with the service. Tech support has been responsive, and number porting has been completed in a timely manner. Marc Fribush has always been accessible when I have any questions.

14-Sep-08 update:

Unfortunately, I'm on my second outage in two days. It appears something at their Atlanta datacenter has failed again. The primary reason I went with Aretta was the pitch that their datacenter was the most reliable available. It appears that this is not the case. It's been down for 8 hours today alone.

Original Review:

I've been using many different providers with my PBX for the last 9 months and have to say that Aretta Communications has been the best for my small group of users. I use it with prepay pay-as-you-go minutes ($0.0139/minute billed in 6 second increments), but there are options to buy package minutes at a discount. The thing I like best is that everything seems to work the way it's supposed to. Haven't had any problems with DTMF, even when using callback (which was a problem with some other providers). I have good luck using fax with the service (YMMV). Occasionally I've had a DID order fail, but customer service has been able to set it right within a day. The only other annoyance is that outbound toll-free calls are charged, albeit at a reduced rate of $0.007/minute. After going through so many providers (and many that were cheaper), Aretta has become my primary outbound trunk for domestic and international termination, and also the provider I purchase the majority of my DID's from.

I've also been using their hosted virtual Asterisk server option for the last 6 months. The uptime has been great, and I've only managed to kill it once by uploading an incompatible FreePBX module. Easy to fix through the control panel, as your files are backed up regularly. If you're looking for virtual Asterisk, give them a try, there are no contracts to worry about.

member for 18.3 years, 2466 visits, last login: 6.5 years ago
updated 13.5 years ago

blunation
join:2006-11-28
Merced, CA

2 edits

blunation

Member

Aretta Communications

Aretta provides our company with excellent sound quality and real time audio and with fast time response to any network related issues that my company may ever occur. Thanks...
ChuckIL9
join:2005-11-07
Peoria, IL

2 edits

ChuckIL9

Member

Re: Aretta Website Down. Servers down. Without Notification.

The datacenter that hosts the Aretta servers (and my asterisk server) is experiencing problems. Would be nice if they had redundant datacenters. First time I've had this happen, and it's kind of a bummer. They are doing DID forwarding if there are crucial numbers that need forwarded immediately.
IPC networks
join:2008-11-09

IPC networks to blunation

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to blunation

Re: Aretta Communications

Please do not use Aretta Communications if you would like your service interrupted. Second there networks bottlenecks and very unstable network. PLEASE READ Terms Of Service. If at any giving time they want to steal your numbers they can and shut your service down and then your clients can sue you for loss and damages. Our company was trying to move away from them immediately because of the dropped calls, echo, popping etc and then we received disconnection of service and they block our LAN Line from us calling them Earlier that day we sent an Emergency Ticket.. **TICKET** Our sips register but not inbound calls. But our other 3000 DID's are working fine with other carriers. HMMM Oh Yeah if you like customer support. They dont have it. Under staffed second they use online email support system sucks and response to your emergencies can take hours for them to respond. If there service is down they will not tell you and then when you submit an emergency ticket saying its down they will charge you saying its not an emergency related issue. The company owner's name is Mark. They use Bandwidth and Level3 Communications for termination and origination. So if your terminate 1 million minutes or more use Level3 like us. And if you use less try Vitelity or Bandwidth. RECOMMEND. Aretta states they are 2 milliseconds from Level3 communications then why are they having so many problems with Latency and dropped calls and long time response when their whole network went off the grid about 2 months ago 2 days in the row.. Redundant ... Nope . You get what you pay for. But the sad thing is they charge more for poor service...
IPC networks

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Oh yeah Blunation is ours too. And the reason why we submitted a change is because mark complained about me posted an unsatisfied posting because he has his house mortgage on his business.