Please don't call us, begs German VoIP phone outfit

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Anonymous Coward

Suspicious.... #

Posted Thursday 13th March 2008 12:46 GMT

....about the timeframe coincidence. I think everyone thinks they are actually Phorm, and have had to disconnect the phones to stop the abusive telephone calls.

Frank Bitterlich

Press statement? #

Posted Thursday 13th March 2008 12:46 GMT

Did you call them for a statement? Opps...

Hey, that guy's coat looks just like mine.... HEY WAIT!

Eugene Crosser

VoIP firms not using VoIP?! #

Posted Thursday 13th March 2008 12:46 GMT

What baffles me most, is that most SIP equipment and service providers publish their POTS numbers but *not* their SIP URLs. Why such negligence to the very technology that they are supposed to promote to the rest of the world?

Anonymous Coward

BT #

Posted Thursday 13th March 2008 13:04 GMT

I didn't realise that BT were in the german market... I thought they were the only ones that had almighty cockups with very simple telecoms jobs.

Maybe Deutche Telecom has been going the same was as BT just we didn't notice over here in Blighty!

James Le Cuirot

Does sound like BT, all right... #

Posted Thursday 13th March 2008 13:39 GMT

When a company I was contracted to decided to switch from BT's own PABX system to an Asterisk-based one (still using ISDN lines, mind you), they cut off the old system a week earlier than we asked them to. Luckily, it didn't take long to finish setting up the new system.

Anonymous Coward

@Eugene... Maybe they are...? #

Posted Thursday 13th March 2008 13:39 GMT

My office uses exclusively VoIP phones - but we publish a "POTS" number not SIP URLs. The number goes through a gateway company, and comes into us as IAX.

Mebbe Snom are doing just that - and don't actually have any internet connectivity...?

Anonymous Coward

Not even 3G? #

Posted Thursday 13th March 2008 15:35 GMT

When a certain utilities company were kind enough to put a pneumatic drill straight through our fibre coming into the building we grabbed a couple of laptops with 3G data cards and had net access that way.

I'm sure any business that's meant to be as tech-savvy as snom could easily manage the same!

Paris because I'm sure even she could manage to set up the above!

Anonymous Coward

42:42 Though shalt eat your own dogfood #

Posted Thursday 13th March 2008 16:12 GMT

Well... They should have used their own VOIP service.

PH as an appropriate approximation of their IT's technical prowess.

Christian Berger

Deutsche Telekom #

Posted Thursday 13th March 2008 22:46 GMT

Well BT is on the german market, but as it seems not for phone lines.

Deutsche Telekom is known for doing things like assigning a new customer a number of an already existing one. Or sending a customer a large package containing a few hundred bills of other customers.

Eugene Crosser

@AC - re. not using VoIP #

Posted Thursday 13th March 2008 22:46 GMT

> My office uses exclusively VoIP phones - but we publish a "POTS" number not SIP URLs.

which begs exactly my previous question: why don't you?!

> Mebbe Snom are doing just that - and don't actually have any internet connectivity...?

Snom not only has connectivity, they have appropriate SRV record in the DNS:

$ host -t srv _sip._udp.snom.com

_sip._udp.snom.com has SRV record 5060 5060 5060 intern.snom.com.

I am certain that if you dial just sip:anything@snom.com, you will get through. But this is not advertised on their contacts web page.

Matthew Wright

What about e164? #

Posted Friday 14th March 2008 11:51 GMT

e164 does POTS to SIP mappings, and is a service often used with IP telephone systems to cut call costs, the system is DNS based, resolving POTS telephone numbers into xyz@gateway.corporation.com

A quick lookup of 0.3.3.8.9.3.0.3.9.4.e164.arpa returns, as Eugene said above sip:0@intern.snom.com

So if I pick up my desk phone, and dial SNOM's number, the phone call gets looked up in DNS against e164, and the call is completed over IP, or in this case it doesn't, as their SIP server is down as well as their POTS ;-)