Rantings of a Queer Pagan

Candian VOIP Provider down, second time in a month.

The beginning of the month is turning out to be a curse for Canadian VOIP provider Primus Tel. Last month a late night firmware upgrade involving the companies customers using Dlink hardware encountered an error that locked up the devices and their clients Internet connections, shutting out many customers for days, some even for weeks. The company attributed this to human error, and it is understandable that these things happen. To it's credit the company has stepped up and offered those affected a $30 credit on their bills.

In our age of always on communication we regard outages as big events that shouldn't happen, even though they are ultimately inevitable. As such we should point out the Primus Talk Broadband service (VOIP) like many VOIP providers have an Out-Of-Service roll over feature that allows calls to be routed to landlines or cell phones when their systems are knocked off line, a feature we don't really see in Traditional POTS Systems.

It's seems however that this evening, March 2nd 2007, has provided another challenge to the Primus customer base, support and engineering staff. At approx. 18:00 mst the entire network went dead and as of this writing is still down. The Talk Broadband forums on the companies customer portal quickly filled up bringing it to a crawl with complaints of phones such as mine just started ringing incessantly and refused to produce a dial tone. This is yet another frustrating example of the unpredictability of VOIP technology.

As fragile as it seems though, when I ask myself if it was worth switching from POTS lines to VOIP, I have to answer yes, because even though the last month has been wrought with problems, the prior year wasn't and the control and features, not to mention the price point, make the occasional glitch bearable. After all, it's not like a cable cut hasn't taken down a POTS system for days on end. At least with VOIP, the problems are logistically easier to fix, and likely to come back fast, and with Out-of-service forwarding, I'm not likely to miss call.

Update: Within 1.5hrs of the problem happening Primus enginers have replaced a blown switch, restored service and notified their customers through the forums. Again, what ILEC, CLEC could do that?

posted by Kasper @ 19:23