Thus disconnects VoIP service Thus will shut down its Pipecall VoIP product at the end of this month, and has told customers they'll have to do the legwork if they want to keep their numbers. The service was launched in 2005 by Legend Communications, which was later bought by Thus. Thus, itself having been acquired by Cable & Wireless last year, told …
Well, while we have no interest in VOIP, we have shortlisted Thus as one of the potential suppliers of our 200mbps link between three sites.
To shaft your customers like this is a disgrace - I'll be recommending we drop Thus from consideration.
Sure - services sometimes have to be pulled - but at this short notice, in this fashion? A disgrace. You might have offloaded your VOIP customers - but you now look unreliable and arrogant.
I guess most people don't tend to use the "cloud" moniker, but distributed VOIP (IE VOIP Without local servers under the control of the corporation) is a cloud service and this is one of the great vunerabilities of cloud services. Beyond the obvious privacy issues is the fact your SMB owner can come in one morning and find they have no phones, no email, no network files storage and no business applications because their cloud providers have simply run out of money, or been purchased by some bigger company that doesn't want your business.
It's companies doing things like this, where they've tried to jump on the VoIP bandwagon, found it's actually not as easy as they thought to provide, and so decided to just ditch it that gives VoIP a bad name.
Fair enough deciding to discontinue the service (business decision etc etc), but how hard would it have been to do a deal with one of the bigger VoIP providers to just move the customer base across - good for the customers (they get continued service), and in fact good for Thus (they could almost certainly find a provider willing to pay them for the business, or even an ongoing royalty etc!)
For anybody in this situation, I don't know how Thus provided their service, but assuming they used one of the big VoIP wholesalers rather than direct interconnects with BT etc themselves, then you might have a chance of being able to port the number out...
I would love to feel sorry or even amused, but seen as I was around for when WE originally launched it and saw it all go, well, arse over tit... Just, kinda feel a bit of a shame. Legend was a great place to work (Lancaster at least) - wasn't on the phones so that added to the bonus - with some great people. This was the begining of the end...
Coat well, because thats all most people left with...
Posters, and the article itself, suggest Thus management are permitted decision making. Cable&Wireless now own Thus, and are gradually stripping the company down.
Cable&Wireless have mentioned that they wish Thus to concentrate on the areas which make credible profit. Their VoIP service does not.
It's probably important to mention that as far as I understand it Thus are simply resellers of Cable&Wireless products, although those products are rebadged Thus. This article and the above comments seem to suggest Thus is still a sole entity, with real products.
Sadly this is no longer the case. Thus are finished. For those out of touch, use theregister's search facility.
I've been gone over a year now but they were a direct provider with direct links to BT.
The ranges were never moved across to the Thus or CW accounts so porting agreements only exist with BT.
VoIP was seen as the great future back in the day hence the purchase of Legend by Thus unfortunately the simultaneous buying of YC meant Legend and Pipe were just left to die.
It's sad but not surprising.
We have been shafted by Thus/ Pipecall - letter received on Saturday 12th Sept - but dated 31st August - BANK HOLIDAY... yeah... we believe you... one months notice...NOT
Now have 2 weeks to try and port number or thousand's of £ of stationery gone to waste.
THUS ARE A TOTAL AND ABSOLUTE DISGRACE
Just to add my comment on this shambles. Our company will be left with no phone numbers in two weeks. We've just this week received their letter (14th September) , dated TWO WEEKS AGO (31st August, which was Bank Holiday Monday), which stated:
"For the avoidance of doubt, this letter constitutes 30 days notice of termination of service".
I presume the letter was back-dated - I can't imagine they sent these out on a bank holiday. Also, all news stories I've found on the matter are dated this week. So now we're left with just two weeks to find a new provider, and hopefully port our numbers across. Any ideas on how to do this?!
A few weeks ago our service was suspended, and when we phoned Pipecall (or whatever they're called these days) to question it, it appeared that our line was hacked int, and suspicious international calls were made. The representitive I spoke to stated that it had happened to a lot of their customers and was a problem that had occured with their service, and he wiped all associated call charges. Could a big network hack have been a precursor to the closure of Pipecall?
Similarly to all others we received notification on the 12th Sept a Saturday of termination on the 31st September. The issue here is not the VoIP service, can can procure and setup SIP/IAX trunking for many vendors and it’s quick and simple. The impact is with the inbound Non Geographics Numbers (NGN).
It seems the only person that Pipecall has a porting agreement with is BT, in discussion with BT they advised that the porting may well take up to 20 days, they also have an amassing charging structure of £10 per number per month and something like 3.5p per minute for all inbound 0845 numbers. Clearly a finacial burden that the majority of SME will not except especially if they have multiple 0845 numbers.
The situation gets even more perverse,
The range owner for our numbers is THUS not Pipecall, having discussed this with the THUS porting team it appears they are unable to port the numbers to THUS from Pipecall, even though they own them and are the range holder.
I have tried to call the so called Product Director a Dan Cole, who’s name the letter came in and he is being screened by his PA and voicemail, he has not returned my calls. I have raised a complaint through the Pipecall help desk, this was defined as their customer complaint escalation process again I have not received a response. It is typical of a C&W managed organisation that their management is of such poor calibre that they are not prepared to defend their decisions and hide behind their secretaries skirts and front office staff. I can say that with some experience having worked there for 10 years.
C&W has a long and sordid history of poorly implemented acquisitions and failed integrations, these have almost without exception led to loss of shareholder value and enormous customer dissatisfaction.
It is imperative that C&W/THUS take a more customer centric approach to the ceasing of the Pipecall NGN services, if there are others who would like to join us in urgently putting pressure on C&W/THUS to re-structure the closure of the Pipecall platform please contact me, I have posted contact details below.
All we are asking for is that the numbers can be ported to the THUS NGN platform prior to the Pipecall platform being decommissioned, this does not sound unreasonable.
Justin Millner – DSM Systems
info@dsmsystems.co.uk
Although the letters were only sent out in the past few days, anyone could have seen this coming a mile off as soon as Thus took over Legend / Pipecall.
All Thus were interested in when buying the company was to please the shareholders to make it look like management were actually taking the company in a positive direction, rather than letting Thus languish with no growth or innovation, which is actually what was really happening.
Therefore as soon as the deal was done, Legend was left to rot, "integration" as they called it didn't really happen for several years and mainly involved porting simple products like webhosting ,adsl and email.
This stagnation and lack of direction is why Thus eventually approved the takeover by C&W because they realised they were on a sinking ship and were only just about bailing out enough water to keep them afloat. The company was only treading water in a fast moving sector.
The pipecall platform is not being shutdown for any reason other than they no longer have anyone on-board that understands it, or has even the remotest idea of how it works. All the best people jumped ship long ago and have moved their careers onwards rather than working for this dinosaur of a company.
There has been no real support of this product for several years, and the reasons they cite for shutting it down are rubbish, just to cover their corporate rear end. At the end of the day they don't understand it so are shutting it down, simple.
They could easily integrate it onto the existing Thus telephony network (with is again seperate to the c&w network) and therefore enable proper number portability - they are just being lazy and can't be bothered with the hassle of the datafill. The plafform originally was built on BT (Pipemedia) interconnects, Thus have plenty of BT interconnects, it doesn't even take a telco engineer to work out how easy it would be to port the numbers.
If Thus had been members of ITSPA the UK trade organisation for VoIP, they would have signed up to a Code of Best Practice for porting. All 70 or so members of ITSPA agree to transfer telephone numbers between them on request of the customer or if a member company fails.
The lesson here is to only join a Service Provider who is a member.
You will find the CoBP and member list at ITSPA org uk
I'm the CEO of Voipfone and Council member of ITPSA; you're welcome to join my service, but sadly we can not port Thus numbers. (Although you can port your numbers from Thus to BT and then from BT to Voipfone if the numbers are vital to your business.)
I've been screwed over really badly by Demon Internet several times in the past few years. So much that I now recommend that nobody gets involved with them. They have the worst customer services on the planet. Its a terrible shame and a good example of a great company that got brought out then destroyed.
As for SIP, AFAIK it isn't usually secure - so who is going to have 'that' much faith in it? I agree that distributed systems are better for this kind of thing (because the Internet isn't always available), but at the moment there isn't really much choice...
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