[WXC/VFX] WorldxChange VFX VoIP service

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#50952 3-Nov-2006 16:34

sbiddle: I used to use a WRT54g with Sveasoft firmware that supports L7. QoS works extremely well on this - simply set a rule to filter VoIP traffic (catches all of the main protocols), and set your upstream & downstream speed and it works pretty well.

Thanks very much for your comments Steve, I appreciate them.

I tried a LinkSys box that supported this kind of QoS prioritisation in 7 levels. It didn't work at all for me, the VoIP traffic was still broken up by large incoming e-mail attachments. I think the reason is that you have a TCL cable connection with huge (relative to mine) bandwidth.

I am on a wireless connection with 512kbps down and 128kbps up. The only way I have found to prevent dropouts in VoIP during incoming e-mail attachments is to ensure that any PCs on the network can ONLY USE 80% of so of the available downstream bandwidth. This leaves around 20% left over for my 2 VoIP systems.

In thinking about this, I realised it is probably because my ISP, and all the routers between the source of the VoIP packets and my router, probably do not support prioritisation based on QoS. In any case, I have no way of controlling the prioritisation of the packets sent from VFX. In the case of my other H323 VoIP system, I can control the prioritisation at both ends, but it made no difference.

If anybody has other ideas as to why this should be, I am all ears...

sbiddle: My current setup is a HP NetConnect server running ClarkConnect 4.0 that also runs my Asterisk PBX on it and CNet managed switch that supports QoS. I have ClarkConnect tagging all incoming VoIP packets and have priority given to the associated UDP ports (10001-10050 in my system) as well as QoS set for my upstream & downstream speed. This gives me perfect quality both incoming and outgoing over my TCL cable connection.

The whole QoS issue can be very complex, you only have to read some of the online forums to realise this. The downside is that unless you have QoS enabled you will suffer degredation of voice service if you try and use the interweb at the same time as talking on the phone without it.

Your current setup sounds excellent Steve, and if I had the time and other reasons to install such a server and software, I would certainly give it a try.

However, my current setup is preventing any problems on the incoming VoIP packets and it is just a small box, that plugs in and works (more-or-less).

During a long conversation my wife had on the phone just now, I was repeatedly loading pages from Geekzone and she didn't notice any dropouts at all. That's the most important thing

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#50961 3-Nov-2006 17:40

Grant17:
I am on a wireless connection with 512kbps down and 128kbps up. The only way I have found to prevent dropouts in VoIP during incoming e-mail attachments is to ensure that any PCs on the network can ONLY USE 80% of so of the available downstream bandwidth. This leaves around 20% left over for my 2 VoIP systems.

QoS will always zap some of your available bandwidth which is the only problem with it.

In thinking about this, I realised it is probably because my ISP, and all the routers between the source of the VoIP packets and my router, probably do not support prioritisation based on QoS. In any case, I have no way of controlling the prioritisation of the packets sent from VFX. In the case of my other H323 VoIP system, I can control the prioritisation at both ends, but it made no difference.

Who is your ISP? To check if your upstream for 802.1p precedence you can use

pathping www.server.com -T

which will do a tracert and analyse each hop

This is pointless however unless your router is actually tagging the packets once they leave your router, I know most routers won't do this, the exceptions being with 3rd party firmware where you can add stuff manually using iptables.

It sounds like you're setup is working reasonably well, I still experience the odd issue and have found over the past couple of months that the quality of calls to Australia using my Australian ITSP (Faktortel) has got quite bad at times but this seems to be an issue of congestion somewhere. During offpeak times it's fine but during the evenings there can be issues so I've had to switch to GSM as my codec which has solved most of the problems. I was probably a bit greedy expecting ulaw to work but it did for a long time with no troubles.

amigo

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#50968 3-Nov-2006 18:33

I got my VFX line set up on my router today.

Discovered a few little problems that I hope can be ironed out. :(

First:

Has anyone on VFX tried calling their number from an iTalk account?

I wanted to hear what my voice mail sounded like, but from iTalk's Softphone I got the message, "The number you have dialled is not in service". I tried it with an area code and international area code too, but same thing.

I assume iTalk have not updated their dialling plans (or whatever) to include phone numbers starting with 7 instead of the normal 3 or 9 numbers. So it's not really VFX's fault, though maybe should advise iTalk of their 7xx xxxx numbers.

A few other minor gripes that I could have fixed myself in a few minutes, but can't cos I've no access to my Voice settings now:

The time set by provisioning has not been updated for daylight savings. My digital phone relies on this info for its clock and caller ID call logs. Just had feedback about this and they say its happening with some boxes and the hopefully can adjust it for me on Monday.

The caller ID shows NZ number with an additonal 0, eg 003 XXX XXXX or 009 xxx xxxx. Mobile phone calls have 00 extra, eg 00021 xxx xxxx. If I hit recall on my phone it says "The number you have dialled is not in service". They've said it is a function with my phone which can be changed in the phone itself. I've just checked the manual and I can only add prefixes, but not remove them. :(

I know I can dial *66 or *69 to redial or recall, but that's an extra inconvienece and I'll forget which is which and it won't let me recall the second to last person who called for example. Also screws up my whole phonebook, if I want my phone to say the name of the person calling I have to have them in the phonebook as 00X XXX XXXX, and then the phonebook becomes useless if I want to then use the phone book to dail them direct. iTalk would send 0064X prefixes to my phone, which i used for my phonebook and was OK to dial with. Though I did have 00643 prefixes omitted using a dialplan string, just incase I was charged toll rates for local calls.

Silence Suppression seems to be enabled. This is an annoyance to me because the clarity of my phone is so good, I can hear a distinct difference between background noise (eg TV, or a machine running) and silence. When I talk to someone with a digital phone who has a backgound noise, as I speak the background noise is suppressed (to save data transfer) but between words or pauses in my speech the background noise cuts back in during my silence... It is quite distracting to me and was one of the first things I turned off when I set up my box with iTalk!

The Email notification of voice messages could be improved by having the voice message attached to the email like the iTalk email notification. I'm just getting the number called and when. Website says "Email Distribution Lists - Forward your voicemail messages to your email." maybe you can... but its not obvious to me how.

Voice mail access from home phone could be shorter like *55 and have the option to omit the pin number.

Is there any live billing account access? There doesn't appear to be any calls/billing info in the portal.
I tried using my portal login on the Xnet customer account login to see if it was handled there.

Gumble, gumble, gumble... OK now for some positive points! :)

I've had to call VFX technical support a few times today, got through to a real person immediately and was able to speak to the same person I'd been dealing with previously.

If the dial tone is any indication of quality a first impression at least, the VFX tone is very clear and consistent. iTalk's one sounds pretty grungy. Couldn't really tell any obvious improvement (compared to iTalk) once the conversation was in place.

The "new Voice message" indicator icon displays on my digital phone, and goes away automatically once i've cleared my messages. On iTalk it never came on at all.

0800 access to voice mail is very useful (as is the alias thingee), iTalk used to have an 0800 number but I don't think so now.

Unfortunately I'm not rushing to disconnect my iTalk number just yet. Will have to see if these issues are resolved. The only major grip I had with iTalk was the secuirty (my account was hacked). But if security comes with too many incovinences, and extra cost, then I might be inclined to risk staying with iTalk (I've got their service to email me immediately when any call over $1 is made on my account, so I can take quicker action if its hacked again).

grant_k

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#50972 3-Nov-2006 20:03

I can help you with most of these because I went through exactly the same things yesterday. I'm happy to say that all but one of them have been resolved

amigo: The time set by provisioning has not been updated for daylight savings. My digital phone relies on this info for its clock and caller ID call logs. Just had feedback about this and they say its happening with some boxes and the hopefully can adjust it for me on Monday.

I experienced the same thing with my PAP2 and the guys at VFX fixed it within an hour or so.

The caller ID shows NZ number with an additonal 0, eg 003 XXX XXXX or 009 xxx xxxx. Mobile phone calls have 00 extra, eg 00021 xxx xxxx. If I hit recall on my phone it says "The number you have dialled is not in service". They've said it is a function with my phone which can be changed in the phone itself. I've just checked the manual and I can only add prefixes, but not remove them. :(

Your phone is to blame here I think. My Uniden has 2 displays for Caller ID -- a big one (which shows an extra 0) and a small one (which shows the correct number). The small display on my phone always shows the correct number for landline and mobile calls.

The Email notification of voice messages could be improved by having the voice message attached to the email like the iTalk email notification. I'm just getting the number called and when. Website says "Email Distribution Lists - Forward your voicemail messages to your email." maybe you can... but its not obvious to me how.

YES! You can do that. You just need to enter your e-mail address and it forwards the recorded message as a WAV file. Don't ask me exactly where right now, but I found it yesterday and it works perfectly. Recorded messages were appearing in my e-mail within seconds.

Voice mail access from home phone could be shorter like *55 and have the option to omit the pin number.

It is! You just dial *62 and no PIN required so long as you have selected that option.

Is there any live billing account access? There doesn't appear to be any calls/billing info in the portal.

I asked exactly the same question yesterday. Phil says it is coming soon.

I've had to call VFX technical support a few times today, got through to a real person immediately and was able to speak to the same person I'd been dealing with previously.

Yes, they are excellent aren't they.

Unfortunately I'm not rushing to disconnect my iTalk number just yet.

I have left mine in place for now so that callers get a Voice Mail telling them how to contact us. But going on the last 2 days experiences, I have no plan to use it again.

Cheers,
Grant.

maverick

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#50973 3-Nov-2006 20:05

amigo: I got my VFX line set up on my router today.

Discovered a few little problems that I hope can be ironed out. :(

First:

Has anyone on VFX tried calling their number from an iTalk account?

I wanted to hear what my voice mail sounded like, but from iTalk's Softphone I got the message, "The number you have dialled is not in service". I tried it with an area code and international area code too, but same thing.

I assume iTalk have not updated their dialling plans (or whatever) to include phone numbers starting with 7 instead of the normal 3 or 9 numbers. So it's not really VFX's fault, though maybe should advise iTalk of their 7xx xxxx numbers.

A few other minor gripes that I could have fixed myself in a few minutes, but can't cos I've no access to my Voice settings now:

The time set by provisioning has not been updated for daylight savings. My digital phone relies on this info for its clock and caller ID call logs. Just had feedback about this and they say its happening with some boxes and the hopefully can adjust it for me on Monday.

The caller ID shows NZ number with an additonal 0, eg 003 XXX XXXX or 009 xxx xxxx. Mobile phone calls have 00 extra, eg 00021 xxx xxxx. If I hit recall on my phone it says "The number you have dialled is not in service". They've said it is a function with my phone which can be changed in the phone itself. I've just checked the manual and I can only add prefixes, but not remove them. :(

I know I can dial *66 or *69 to redial or recall, but that's an extra inconvienece and I'll forget which is which and it won't let me recall the second to last person who called for example. Also screws up my whole phonebook, if I want my phone to say the name of the person calling I have to have them in the phonebook as 00X XXX XXXX, and then the phonebook becomes useless if I want to then use the phone book to dail them direct. iTalk would send 0064X prefixes to my phone, which i used for my phonebook and was OK to dial with. Though I did have 00643 prefixes omitted using a dialplan string, just incase I was charged toll rates for local calls.

Silence Suppression seems to be enabled. This is an annoyance to me because the clarity of my phone is so good, I can hear a distinct difference between background noise (eg TV, or a machine running) and silence. When I talk to someone with a digital phone who has a backgound noise, as I speak the background noise is suppressed (to save data transfer) but between words or pauses in my speech the background noise cuts back in during my silence... It is quite distracting to me and was one of the first things I turned off when I set up my box with iTalk!

The Email notification of voice messages could be improved by having the voice message attached to the email like the iTalk email notification. I'm just getting the number called and when. Website says "Email Distribution Lists - Forward your voicemail messages to your email." maybe you can... but its not obvious to me how.

Voice mail access from home phone could be shorter like *55 and have the option to omit the pin number.

Is there any live billing account access? There doesn't appear to be any calls/billing info in the portal.
I tried using my portal login on the Xnet customer account login to see if it was handled there.

Gumble, gumble, gumble... OK now for some positive points! :)

I've had to call VFX technical support a few times today, got through to a real person immediately and was able to speak to the same person I'd been dealing with previously.

If the dial tone is any indication of quality a first impression at least, the VFX tone is very clear and consistent. iTalk's one sounds pretty grungy. Couldn't really tell any obvious improvement (compared to iTalk) once the conversation was in place.

The "new Voice message" indicator icon displays on my digital phone, and goes away automatically once i've cleared my messages. On iTalk it never came on at all.

0800 access to voice mail is very useful (as is the alias thingee), iTalk used to have an 0800 number but I don't think so now.

Unfortunately I'm not rushing to disconnect my iTalk number just yet. Will have to see if these issues are resolved. The only major grip I had with iTalk was the secuirty (my account was hacked). But if security comes with too many incovinences, and extra cost, then I might be inclined to risk staying with iTalk (I've got their service to email me immediately when any call over $1 is made on my account, so I can take quicker action if its hacked again).

Nice List and feedback I have been busy most of the day with a few things with my Guys so we couldn't sort them today but most of these are all sortable and we will work with you to get them sorted.

1. Callplus do not have the Number Ranges sorted in their switch, all WXC Numbers have been sent to all carriers weeks ago by the NAD who control all numbers for the Country. they are just slow activating them in their Network, I will have a workdirectly wit h them and see if we can them moved along.

2. The Daylight Savings will be sorted, we have seen a couple of issues with configs not accepting the Daylight Savings Rule will be changed on Monday.

3. The 00 is the only one that concerns me here, most phones have the option to have the 0 or not not generally Phones should have this option as different Carriers will present differnt A Party Number Formats, we send the Numbers to all users with a 0 - NSN National Significant Number this is because when you use the call services 0 is required with you phone not being able to remove the 0 that it recives it becomes an issue, the same will happen when we present a international call to you with 00 your Phone will add a 0...so as I said this will cause me some concerns...let me think on it and I may have a cunning plan

4. Silence suppression is once again an easy one, this is a change we can do however silence suppression works well for a lot of phone's which are generally the norm.

5. Voice Mail to EMail....why of course we can do this for you, you are getting Notifications only at present because you have set Notify up in your incoming Call setup. take a look under Messaging....you can choose to have a copy of the Voice Message here as well as having an option to press 0 at your Voice Mail message and get diverted to another line...all under your control. Their are actually a lot in the residential offerings so takes a while to find them all. Wait till we start giving the advanced options.

6. *62 my Friend You can log into your Voice Mail and omit the PIN number as well this is an option as well, the 082210 we use is a special service code which you can program into Voice mail Key on a lot of phones, it also means you can dial that number from any Telecom network (apart from Vodafone at present...they are slow activating this number), what is also coming to a VFX portal near you you will also be able to intiate calls directly from it

.

7. Billing online....sorry not yet. but it's coming....Our Company Director's are very hot on this along with our Developers but it's not here yet.

8. italk, feel free to keep your servive with them and compare the 2 we are not afraid of a bit of friendly competition keeps us all honest wouldn't you say.

So I hope I have addressed all of issues some of these you already had just hadn't found them yet, all others are minor with exception of item 3 but let me see what I can do with my Team....

Regards
Phil Moore

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#50974 3-Nov-2006 20:05

sbiddle:
Grant17:
I am on a wireless connection with 512kbps down and 128kbps up. The only way I have found to prevent dropouts in VoIP during incoming e-mail attachments is to ensure that any PCs on the network can ONLY USE 80% of so of the available downstream bandwidth. This leaves around 20% left over for my 2 VoIP systems.

QoS will always zap some of your available bandwidth which is the only problem with it.

No it wont, only you add information to the PDU or frame, you could quite easily implement QoS if all the devices along the way conduced their own traffic analysis and agreed to use the same rules for queuing :)

Realistically however you are right, the effect is very minimal however.

In thinking about this, I realised it is probably because my ISP, and all the routers between the source of the VoIP packets and my router, probably do not support prioritisation based on QoS. In any case, I have no way of controlling the prioritisation of the packets sent from VFX. In the case of my other H323 VoIP system, I can control the prioritisation at both ends, but it made no difference.

Who is your ISP? To check if your upstream for 802.1p precedence you can use

pathping www.server.com -T

which will do a tracert and analyse each hop

This is pointless however unless your router is actually tagging the packets once they leave your router, I know most routers won't do this, the exceptions being with 3rd party firmware where you can add stuff manually using iptables.

It sounds like you're setup is working reasonably well, I still experience the odd issue and have found over the past couple of months that the quality of calls to Australia using my Australian ITSP (Faktortel) has got quite bad at times but this seems to be an issue of congestion somewhere. During offpeak times it's fine but during the evenings there can be issues so I've had to switch to GSM as my codec which has solved most of the problems. I was probably a bit greedy expecting ulaw to work but it did for a long time with no troubles.

Heh I don't know if any ISPs look at either your diff serv or 802.1p and honor or in any way use this information on a standard Internet connection, sounds like a value added service to me.

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maverick

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#50986 4-Nov-2006 07:34

Sorry meant for post this yesterday Amigo

This is also located in your Portal , it's all your feature codes


*72		Call Forwarding Always Activation
*73		Call Forwarding Always Deactivation
*21		Call Forwarding Always To Voice Mail Activation
#21		Call Forwarding Always To Voice Mail Deactivation
*90		Call Forwarding Busy Activation
*91		Call Forwarding Busy Deactivation
*40		Call Forwarding Busy To Voice Mail Activation
#40		Call Forwarding Busy To Voice Mail Deactivation
*92		Call Forwarding No Answer Activation
*93		Call Forwarding No Answer Deactivation
*41		Call Forwarding No Answer To Voice Mail Activation
#41		Call Forwarding No Answer To Voice Mail Deactivation
*67		Calling Line ID Delivery Blocking per Call
*31		Calling Line ID Delivery Blocking Persistent Activation
#31		Calling Line ID Delivery Blocking Persistent Deactivation
*65		Calling Line ID Delivery per Call
*69		Call Return
*43		Call Waiting Persistent Activation
#43		Call Waiting Persistent Deactivation
*70		Cancel Call Waiting
*55		Direct Voice Mail Transfer
*78		Do Not Disturb Activation
*79		Do Not Disturb Deactivation
*66		Last Number Redial

*75		Speed Dial 100
*74		Speed Dial 8
*62		Voice Portal Access

Hope this meets your needs

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#51026 4-Nov-2006 16:57

maverick:
amigo: I got my VFX line set up on my router today.

Has anyone on VFX tried calling their number from an iTalk account?

I wanted to hear what my voice mail sounded like, but from iTalk's Softphone I got the message, "The number you have dialled is not in service". I tried it with an area code and international area code too, but same thing.

I assume iTalk have not updated their dialling plans (or whatever) to include phone numbers starting with 7 instead of the normal 3 or 9 numbers. So it's not really VFX's fault, though maybe should advise iTalk of their 7xx xxxx numbers.

1. Callplus do not have the Number Ranges sorted in their switch, all WXC Numbers have been sent to all carriers weeks ago by the NAD who control all numbers for the Country. they are just slow activating them in their Network, I will have a workdirectly wit h them and see if we can them moved along.

This is strange, I have the same problem at the moment; can't call my VFX number from iTalk, but when I fist got VFX setup a few weeks ago, I could call VFX from iTalk. Are they playing games with us???

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#51031 4-Nov-2006 17:11

More fax fun:

Took my PAP2T round to a friends place, they have 128up/2Mbdn & non QoS router. Tried faxing, with a bit of playing round got one successful send & receive, but it was pretty much downhill after that. Even voice calls were distorted & delayed. I think their Internet link may have been suffering problems too, so are going to investigate that. Will try again soon with a QoS router and see if that solves it. Also I don't think a 128up is very good for G711, but works mint on my usual 512up.

Oops, just as well I didn't need to dial 111 last night, coz I forgot to temporary change my address, lol

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#51049 4-Nov-2006 21:42

Thanks Grant and Phil!

Phil, you must be really committed to be working late on a Friday night answering all these questions!

maverick:
1. Callplus do not have the Number Ranges sorted in their switch, all WXC Numbers have been sent to all carriers weeks ago by the NAD who control all numbers for the Country. they are just slow activating them in their Network, I will have a workdirectly wit h them and see if we can them moved along.

Yeah I thought that might have been the case.

Oh dear, I've just checked my iTalk bill and see that i've been charged 5c each time I've unsuccessfully called my VFX number. The bill says the calls were made to Greymouth (instead of Christchurch)!!

It's been a week now and iTalk have not rebated any of the fraudulent calls, though they have rebated $130 for equipment that I was billed for but had never requested or received. Maybe its time to cut my losses and just pay the final bill and say goodbye.

3. The 00 is the only one that concerns me here, most phones have the option to have the 0 or not not generally Phones should have this option as different Carriers will present differnt A Party Number Formats, we send the Numbers to all users with a 0 - NSN National Significant Number this is because when you use the call services 0 is required with you phone not being able to remove the 0 that it recives it becomes an issue, the same will happen when we present a international call to you with 00 your Phone will add a 0...so as I said this will cause me some concerns...let me think on it and I may have a cunning plan

Hopefully this can be sorted as it was probably the biggest inconvience for me.
I've checked through the manual for my 'Uniden DECT1825+1' phone and there definately is no option for not adding the zero, only an option for adding a prefix. I've checked all the menu options on the phone itself too. I'll email Uniden and see what they suggest.

The same phone on the iTalk service does not add 0's (although it does display the entire international code, eg 0064.)

The odd thing about it though is that (on VFX) an 03/09 etc number only have one 0 added, while 021 has two zeros added, eg 00021.

My main use for the phone's phonebook/recall feature will be for local/nz numbers. If it's possible to add a custom string to my dial plan I'd suggest something like: |<00:0>[3-9]xxxxxxx| If I'm not mistaken that will remove the additional 0 and it should not interfere if I tried to make an international call since more that 8 numbers would follow.

5. Voice Mail to EMail....why of course we can do this for you, you are getting Notifications only at present because you have set Notify up in your incoming Call setup. take a look under Messaging....you can choose to have a copy of the Voice Message here as well as having an option to press 0 at your Voice Mail message and get diverted to another line...all under your control. Their are actually a lot in the residential offerings so takes a while to find them all. Wait till we start giving the advanced options.

Took me a while to find the "E-mail a carbon copy of the voice message to" option. Originally I had set up the "Call Notify" option instead, thinking that was it. Turned out it was a very annoying option as it was filling my email box with notifications of every single call, not just new messages.

This feature is much better than iTalk's for the following reasons: :)
1) You can specify any email address, not just your pre-defined one. So I can get my messages at work, etc without having to log into my home email.
2) The message is not cleared from your Voice Portal once sent. iTalk's one removed it, so if I wasn't checking my email I'd not know that I had a message.
3) The attached WAV files are much smaller, but similar quality. (13 sec iTalk message WAV was 148kb, while a 14 sec VFX message WAV was only 58Kb).

Perhaps you could create more user guides with typical Q&A's in plain English. I'm a fairly technical person myself and getting confused, imagine how less technically-minded customers will cope.

6. *62 my Friend You can log into your Voice Mail and omit the PIN number as well this is an option as well, the 082210 we use is a special service code which you can program into Voice mail Key on a lot of phones, it also means you can dial that number from any Telecom network (apart from Vodafone at present...they are slow activating this number), what is also coming to a VFX portal near you you will also be able to intiate calls directly from it .

Here was another area I got confused... I went down the list saw *55 "Direct Voice Mail Transfer", tried it and got an error message, so I figured it wasn't working. I didn't get down the the far bottom to see *62. I guess *55 will be the code to initate calls directly withine the Voice portal as you mention? If not, what is it?

Again it would be useful to have *62 mentioned in the Voice Portal Guide PDF along with where to find the "Auto-login to Voice Portal when calling from my phone" option.

Another question about the "Send Busy Calls to Voice Mail" option. Does this intefere with call waiting? i.e. would you have to turn this option off to use call waiting, or is it only if you ignore the incoming call?

Phil, I hope you're keeping an accessible up-to-date Q&A database for your staff to refer and add to. Your bound to get the same little questions over and over as you have more customers sign up. For example, my inital problem with the VFX service was that it wouldn't provision. The other day we discovered that it was because the resync value (or something like that) on the provisioning page were set too high. I hope Nick provided this feedback to the team and doesn't keep it to himself.

All too often I see various customer service cases where customers ring up and get told one thing, or don't get a suitable answer, and then on forums like this you find others who have gone through the same problems, yet got good efficient solutions, simply because they happened to be lucky to get someone who was clued up.

Many thanks again. Things are now looking more like a permanent shift to VFX. :)

maverick

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#51092 5-Nov-2006 10:41

amigo: Thanks Grant and Phil!

Phil, you must be really committed to be working late on a Friday night answering all these questions!

maverick:
1. Callplus do not have the Number Ranges sorted in their switch, all WXC Numbers have been sent to all carriers weeks ago by the NAD who control all numbers for the Country. they are just slow activating them in their Network, I will have a workdirectly wit h them and see if we can them moved along.

Yeah I thought that might have been the case.

Oh dear, I've just checked my iTalk bill and see that i've been charged 5c each time I've unsuccessfully called my VFX number. The bill says the calls were made to Greymouth (instead of Christchurch)!!

It's been a week now and iTalk have not rebated any of the fraudulent calls, though they have rebated $130 for equipment that I was billed for but had never requested or received. Maybe its time to cut my losses and just pay the final bill and say goodbye.

3. The 00 is the only one that concerns me here, most phones have the option to have the 0 or not not generally Phones should have this option as different Carriers will present differnt A Party Number Formats, we send the Numbers to all users with a 0 - NSN National Significant Number this is because when you use the call services 0 is required with you phone not being able to remove the 0 that it recives it becomes an issue, the same will happen when we present a international call to you with 00 your Phone will add a 0...so as I said this will cause me some concerns...let me think on it and I may have a cunning plan

Hopefully this can be sorted as it was probably the biggest inconvience for me.
I've checked through the manual for my 'Uniden DECT1825+1' phone and there definately is no option for not adding the zero, only an option for adding a prefix. I've checked all the menu options on the phone itself too. I'll email Uniden and see what they suggest.

The same phone on the iTalk service does not add 0's (although it does display the entire international code, eg 0064.)

The odd thing about it though is that (on VFX) an 03/09 etc number only have one 0 added, while 021 has two zeros added, eg 00021.

My main use for the phone's phonebook/recall feature will be for local/nz numbers. If it's possible to add a custom string to my dial plan I'd suggest something like: |<00:0>[3-9]xxxxxxx| If I'm not mistaken that will remove the additional 0 and it should not interfere if I tried to make an international call since more that 8 numbers would follow.

5. Voice Mail to EMail....why of course we can do this for you, you are getting Notifications only at present because you have set Notify up in your incoming Call setup. take a look under Messaging....you can choose to have a copy of the Voice Message here as well as having an option to press 0 at your Voice Mail message and get diverted to another line...all under your control. Their are actually a lot in the residential offerings so takes a while to find them all. Wait till we start giving the advanced options.

Took me a while to find the "E-mail a carbon copy of the voice message to" option. Originally I had set up the "Call Notify" option instead, thinking that was it. Turned out it was a very annoying option as it was filling my email box with notifications of every single call, not just new messages.

This feature is much better than iTalk's for the following reasons: :)
1) You can specify any email address, not just your pre-defined one. So I can get my messages at work, etc without having to log into my home email.
2) The message is not cleared from your Voice Portal once sent. iTalk's one removed it, so if I wasn't checking my email I'd not know that I had a message.
3) The attached WAV files are much smaller, but similar quality. (13 sec iTalk message WAV was 148kb, while a 14 sec VFX message WAV was only 58Kb).

Perhaps you could create more user guides with typical Q&A's in plain English. I'm a fairly technical person myself and getting confused, imagine how less technically-minded customers will cope.

6. *62 my Friend You can log into your Voice Mail and omit the PIN number as well this is an option as well, the 082210 we use is a special service code which you can program into Voice mail Key on a lot of phones, it also means you can dial that number from any Telecom network (apart from Vodafone at present...they are slow activating this number), what is also coming to a VFX portal near you you will also be able to intiate calls directly from it .

Here was another area I got confused... I went down the list saw *55 "Direct Voice Mail Transfer", tried it and got an error message, so I figured it wasn't working. I didn't get down the the far bottom to see *62. I guess *55 will be the code to initate calls directly withine the Voice portal as you mention? If not, what is it?

Again it would be useful to have *62 mentioned in the Voice Portal Guide PDF along with where to find the "Auto-login to Voice Portal when calling from my phone" option.

Another question about the "Send Busy Calls to Voice Mail" option. Does this intefere with call waiting? i.e. would you have to turn this option off to use call waiting, or is it only if you ignore the incoming call?

Phil, I hope you're keeping an accessible up-to-date Q&A database for your staff to refer and add to. Your bound to get the same little questions over and over as you have more customers sign up. For example, my inital problem with the VFX service was that it wouldn't provision. The other day we discovered that it was because the resync value (or something like that) on the provisioning page were set too high. I hope Nick provided this feedback to the team and doesn't keep it to himself.

All too often I see various customer service cases where customers ring up and get told one thing, or don't get a suitable answer, and then on forums like this you find others who have gone through the same problems, yet got good efficient solutions, simply because they happened to be lucky to get someone who was clued up.

Many thanks again. Things are now looking more like a permanent shift to VFX. :)

Hi Amigo,

Thanks for the feedback, appreciate the comments on user quides and FAQ, Yes Nick did dicuss the issue with me, so the staff will generally now be telling customers to save the link then powercycle the box, we will hopefully get better and better at supporting the FAQ and quides so feedback is apprecaited, the only issue for us is pleasing everybody

as some people find it easy and others do not...the old Holden vs Ford thing, the Customer Care team are pretty good as well and are generally always talking amongst themselves when issues problems arise and don't have access to OP's support so they will generally be sharing the Knowledge and are getting better and better as the days go on, so a quick call to them as well can also help.

We will be working on improving our user guides and FAQ's but bear with us on this.

I will look at what we can do for the your phones CLI option there may be a cleaner way to do it

Yes I am a employee of WxC (My Profile) ... but I do have my own opinions as well

https://www.facebook.com/wxccommunications

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amigo

161 posts

Master Geek

#51120 5-Nov-2006 17:05

I've kissed goodbye to iTalk... well almost...

I decided to call them today to ask about the rebate on fraudulent calls that were made on my account so I could pay the balance due. I was in the queue for a while and got through to someone who then put the on hold to check some details for a while, and then I ended up in the queue again for 15 minutes and had to start all over again with somebody new...<yawn>

I explained what had just happened, and said this time that I had had enough and just wanted to pay whatever is owning and close the account. She told me that she couldn't close the account over the phone, but I would have to either do it online or in writing. So I got her step me through the online cancellation process. It didn't work.

She also couldn't give me a final balance to pay beause it was still under investigation and that my account was just a one of many that were affected by the hacking. So it could take some time.

Meanwhile she has put my account on 'dispute' status and will get somebody to sort it out and call me back and try and cancel the account.

In just one month of using the iTalk service, I had been incorrectly billed for the following:
-equipment that was never requested or sent to me
-erratic charges for calls made to the messaging service.
-fraudulent calls
-local calls that failed to even connect.

Their product itself was pretty good, however, I have spent hours on the phone (mostly in queues) trying to sort out billing issues.

I'll be glad to finally get rid of iTalk.

Let's hope that VFX get it right. It's looking very promising! :)

01EG

612 posts

Ultimate Geek
+1 received by user: 36

#51191 6-Nov-2006 12:20

Hi guys,
This morning got my PAP2T, called to Xnet sales and provided with my MAC. Processing the application was really fun, lady asked me a lot of “Can you confirm …?”, am I terrorist or spy? Especially two question: “Can you confirm that you are TCL customer?” and next question “Can you confirm that you are not Telecom customer?” When I signed-up with Telecom (1996) and TCL (ex Saturn 1998/99?) (long time ago) I remember nobody asked me the questions like those ones. Why is that?

I'm confused, what next step? Lady told me that she will supply me all information. Now is lunchtime and got nothing.

grant_k

3539 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 124

Trusted

#51195 6-Nov-2006 12:46

01EG: I'm confused, what next step? Lady told me that she will supply me all information. Now is lunchtime and got nothing.

Be a little patient and give WorldxChange a chance here. In the next few hours you will receive an e-mail with all the details you need.

Just remember to enter the URL for the Provisioning Server into where it says PROFILE RULE on the provisioning page. Save Changes and then unplug the power from your PAP2. Wait 10 seconds and power it up again. Everything should start working after that. You should see the PHONE 1 light come on and then you will be able to make phone calls. Enjoy!

maverick

3594 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 80

Trusted

WorldxChange

#51198 6-Nov-2006 13:10

01EG: Hi guys,
This morning got my PAP2T, called to Xnet sales and provided with my MAC. Processing the application was really fun, lady asked me a lot of “Can you confirm …?”, am I terrorist or spy? Especially two question: “Can you confirm that you are TCL customer?” and next question “Can you confirm that you are not Telecom customer?” When I signed-up with Telecom (1996) and TCL (ex Saturn 1998/99?) (long time ago) I remember nobody asked me the questions like those ones. Why is that?

I'm confused, what next step? Lady told me that she will supply me all information. Now is lunchtime and got nothing.

Hi O1EG,

I just checked with my guys and see that you were sent a confirmation EMail saying your account was swtup at 12.34pm ...thats not 2 bad is it in getting you setup

, try getting a new phone line with Telecom and see how long it takes.....

PS. The questions are only for our internal processes to make sure we Dot the I's and cross the T's hate to have unsatisfied customers because we got their account details wrong.

Yes I am a employee of WxC (My Profile) ... but I do have my own opinions as well

https://www.facebook.com/wxccommunications

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