VOIP Tech Chat → [Voip.ms] Any new features coming up?

When I first signed up for a voip.ms account, they were introducing new features every few months.

Now, several years later, it seems that new feature development has come of a halt! I think it has been over a year since a major feature was introduced.

There are a lot of good suggestions listed under the "Feature Request" section of their portal. Hopefully these are still being worked on!

This is an excellent point.

But which do you think should take priority: [new features] or [resolving issues with server stability and apparent issues with DID's] ?

Ha, OK you got me. Obviously, server stability and DID reliability should take precedence. But, have they really been having reliability issues over the entire past year?

As with everything in our life, the answer lies right in the middle - find and keep good balance. Take one side or another and you'll be thrown out of the market, sooner or later... IMHO, it looks like they try to do the latter and see what'll happen.

There's indeed a great bunch of EXCELLENT suggestions we've received. Lots of them, and lots of them are on the table.

We've designed a new website to replace our expired look for the main page (not the interface) and our programmers are almost done developing an entirely new redesigned reseller interface which will allow for EACH of our features in the customer portal to be used in the reseller interface.

This may not sound very useful to you but it actually was a very requested feature and this took a lot of man power to redesign the whole thing via API so that new releases in our main interface will reflect in the reseller interface.

Once these are released (prob this month or january top), our guys will get their hands on the tons of great suggestions we received.

Keep in mind that we will be aiming to simplify things in our interface without affecting the highly customizable experience. So a lot of tweaks and minor addons (that are often considered as "features" by some providers") might not see the light of day. But everything we feel that can improve on the customer experience will be added / modified (well, most of them).

What ever happened to the answer confirmation for call forwarding to multiple lines that was to arrive late 2011 ??

Will they be updating the copyright date? It's the primary metric by which I judge a VoIP provider.

LOL, and we can sure use it today....

What can you determine by using a time stamp?

It's an inside joke.

No need to spam with useless stuff guys keep it relevant for readers.

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[new features] or [resolving issues with server stability and apparent issues with DID's] ?

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This is a bit misleading.

I can assure you our 20+ support employees, programmers and sys admins working in our 2 floor support facility are as busy as ever and the customer base exploded in the last few months. That LNP promo may have played against us a little bit. But that pure speculation from your part that we're somehow "trying to get out of business sounds weird to me. Where did you get that? VoIP.ms never been that healthy in years and we've been a little bit victim of our own success in the last month or so but we're taking action and it seem the people making the biggest deal about our "problems" are not actual regular customers.

Customers have been posting useful feedback and we're working hard to meet their standards but non customer seem to be spouting false rumours. Gotta love the internet.

Here, I'm posting a picture of a cat, because the internetz love cats.

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I can assure you our 20+ support employees, programmers and sys admins working in our 2 floor support facility are as busy as ever....We've designed a new website to replace our expired look for the main page (not the interface) and our programmers are almost done developing an entirely new redesigned reseller interface which will allow for EACH of our features in the customer portal to be used in the reseller interface.

This may not sound very useful to you but it actually was a very requested feature and this took a lot of man power to redesign the whole thing via API so that new releases in our main interface will reflect in the reseller interface.

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I guess you know what you are doing, but as an average user it is hard for me to believe that a reseller interface for a residential provider like voip.ms is half as important as other things that have been mentioned.

By now you would have been a more interesting and useful company if you had put all that manpower to work on almost anything other than a reseller interface.

That sounds spot on. The number of people who care about the reseller interface must be miniscule compared to those who would like to see a call-forward confirm, or see the Toronto server fixed, or would like to see automatic failover, or dozens of other suggestions implemented.

I hope I am wrong, but spending the past year or whatever it has been on a reseller interface sounds like a colossal waste of time, money and reputation.

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"The number of people who care about the reseller interface must be miniscule compared to those who would like to see a call-forward confirm, or see the Toronto server fixed, or would like to see automatic failover, or dozens of other suggestions implemented."

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I understand how important the call forward confirm might be important to some, it's not a question of man power for this option. We can release it now outside of a ring group, but we're still having issue with our vendor when it's being used when the call is forwarded to multiple destinations. We're awaiting to switch to the latest software release to make new test. (yes, we don't compile a free asterisk version from the internet, we purchase from Digium)

The number of people who care about the reseller is not minuscule. Our reseller represent a very large portion of our income, even though they do not all use that interface of course.

Toronto, as I posted in another thread, is already being tested in another data center. The fault lies in the provider not being able to handle DDoS properly (they can have downtimes up to 60 minutes) whereas with our other data centers, we manage DDoS/DoS attacks within minutes. So this IS being worked on.

Automatic failover are touchy, because our multiple pops are ACTIVE locations and not "stand by emergency pops". Besides, once we finish moving out of our "weak" data centers. What we have in mind is SRV within the SAME data centre and a quick manual "switch" to flip on a different geo center if one location goes down entirely. This will be much more useful than what would be considered a "patch" (automatic failover) just because one data center provider is currently having issues. So plans and procedures have been discussed and tested. phase one includes SRV within same data centers, and phase 2 would be failover to a different pop. We currently have 2 alpha servers in our Montreal server in SRV, and is being used by some employees.

As mentionned, other suggestions are being worked on. I can assure you we're not "wasting our money". While I can certainly understand some specific features really have been dragging on a bit (1 to confirm), things are being blown out of proportion. But it's great to read feedback.

A lack of features that some are looking forward to doesn't mean we stopped working. However, I do apologize about the delay in the release of the 1 Confirm option. It's definately near the top and we'll do everything possible with our vendor to release that ASAP.

Regards

Thanks for the update Martin. It looks like some interesting things are in the works.

Yes, thanks MartinM for the detailed update.

I hope I am wrong, but if I were saying this, people might think I meant, "The money I am spending with them has got to be more valuable than that of anyone (everyone?) else."

I spend about $6 a month with voip.ms. I'd love to have more features. I've sent them a few suggestions and a few complaints. But I try to maintain a realistic perspective: As a miniscule customer, I know that if they get enough similar requests from others, they might do something. Likewise, they might do something if it's really cheap and easy to implement but no one had asked before.

The competition would love to see RFPs from customers who need those features. When you leave, tell voip.ms why, and I am sure they'll take that into consideration.

From a customer's perspective, it would be better to make the Point of Presence setting unnecessary, at least for customers that use registration. If VoIP.ms could route calls to users simply based on whichever PoP they registered to most recently, you would be able to use logic with devices that support DNS SRV like "Seattle PoP is first priority; if that is unreachable, then distribute its registrations evenly over these six other PoPs."

That way even if my specific ISP has a routing issue to Seattle and my phone registers to Chicago instead, I can still receive calls. Manual switches take time, especially if there is an issue at night when the person who knows how to flip the switch is asleep.

Thanks for the update.

Perhaps, if there is time in-house, or if VoIP.MS has a service contract with Digium, someone can add a few lines of code to chan_sip.c to ensure that ring back (early media) is sent, or to send/resend 180 Ringing to activate local ring back.

This may take care of the "dead silence" (no ring back/no early media) issue until resources are increased.

check_rtp_timeout() (called by dialog_checkrtp_cb()) checks timers, and a call to difftime( time(NULL), dialog->lastrtptx ) will return the number of seconds since the last frame of RTP data (ring back/early media) was transmitted.

If the SIP_PROGRESS_SENT bit or the SIP_RINGING bit is set, and the time since the last RTP transmission continues to increase (no ring back/no early media), then sending/resending 180 Ringing to trigger local ring back may be a good idea.