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E911 is complicated when it comes to VOIP. With providers such as Flowroute or Vitelity, you basically fill out a form with your current address/location and it

E911 is complicated when it comes to VOIP. With providers such as Flowroute or Vitelity, you basically fill out a form with your current address/location and it takes some time to propagate to whatever system the dispatchers use. Basically, you can kiss E911 good-bye if you're using VOIP on the go. Re reliability: VOIP, especially over a data plan, is not as reliable as conventional networks. I wouldn't rely on it for emergency situations. I switched from landlines a number of years ago at home and I've been at the mercy of my cable company outages. FYI, I run a dedicated Freeswitch box and my providers are Flowroute and Vitelity.

josh2600 14y ago
We <3 freeswitch and run it at the core. On Kazoo we do Dash e911 via API so you can program all the DIDs in one fell swoop. There are a variety of reasons why e911 sucks, not the least of which is the fact that if you don't populate it, the calls go to the Nation 911 hotline, which is slower due to not being local :/. Don't even get started on the topic of SIP based e911 on Softphones, it's a joke. Flowroute and Vitelity are awesome; in particular the CEO of flowroute is a smart dude. Bayan was on VUC last week talking about the future of service provider networks (specifically that he envisions a world with SBC's). That's interesting, to say the least. VoIP over a data plan is as reliable as your connection. That being said, use G.729 if you can as the lower bitrate holds up better over GSM/LTE networks. That being said, don't rely on it solely as there is no SLA on packets carried over the public internet.
- mkhattab 14y ago
  I love Flowroute. Their web interface is much cleaner than Vitelity's. However, I wish they would take the initiative in supporting more open codecs other than G.729, G.711, etc. I dislike the G.729 licensing scheme. On another note, I was surprised about a year ago that Flowroute added support for T.38, yet there was no announcement made. In spite this, I haven't been able to get faxes to properly transmit and receive. By the way, Kazoo screenshots look nice, definitely going to check it out.
  - josh2600 14y ago
    T.38 In VoIP is tricky. We run almost every codec in Kazoo that FS supports (711, 722, 729, all the way up to Siren64Khz and h.263 for video), and I can tell you that t.38 has been the trickiest. A lot of the transformations layer7 firewalls apply to packets, particularly SIP packets, can cause unexpected side effects with an extremely time sensitive application like fax. In short, moving packets involves buffering on some level, and fax machines are intolerant of any jitter or delay. Therefore, delivering media in t.38 becomes an exercise in conflict mitigation. In summary, t.38 is active on a lot of providers who don't talk about it because heterogenous equipment might not play nice.

josh2600 14y ago

We <3 freeswitch and run it at the core. On Kazoo we do Dash e911 via API so you can program all the DIDs in one fell swoop. There are a variety of reasons why e911 sucks, not the least of which is the fact that if you don't populate it, the calls go to the Nation 911 hotline, which is slower due to not being local :/. Don't even get started on the topic of SIP based e911 on Softphones, it's a joke. Flowroute and Vitelity are awesome; in particular the CEO of flowroute is a smart dude. Bayan was on VUC last week talking about the future of service provider networks (specifically that he envisions a world with SBC's). That's interesting, to say the least. VoIP over a data plan is as reliable as your connection. That being said, use G.729 if you can as the lower bitrate holds up better over GSM/LTE networks. That being said, don't rely on it solely as there is no SLA on packets carried over the public internet.

mkhattab 14y ago
I love Flowroute. Their web interface is much cleaner than Vitelity's. However, I wish they would take the initiative in supporting more open codecs other than G.729, G.711, etc. I dislike the G.729 licensing scheme. On another note, I was surprised about a year ago that Flowroute added support for T.38, yet there was no announcement made. In spite this, I haven't been able to get faxes to properly transmit and receive. By the way, Kazoo screenshots look nice, definitely going to check it out.
- josh2600 14y ago
  T.38 In VoIP is tricky. We run almost every codec in Kazoo that FS supports (711, 722, 729, all the way up to Siren64Khz and h.263 for video), and I can tell you that t.38 has been the trickiest. A lot of the transformations layer7 firewalls apply to packets, particularly SIP packets, can cause unexpected side effects with an extremely time sensitive application like fax. In short, moving packets involves buffering on some level, and fax machines are intolerant of any jitter or delay. Therefore, delivering media in t.38 becomes an exercise in conflict mitigation. In summary, t.38 is active on a lot of providers who don't talk about it because heterogenous equipment might not play nice.