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back to article Biz phones 'n' broadband bods Gamma suffer a network TITSUP

Business broadband comms outfit Gamma is experiencing a service outage. According to monitoring site Down Detector, the problem began this morning just after 8am. One customer told us: "I am a reseller and we are having issues with customer phones also... Still ongoing." Another said: "We have customers reporting one way …

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  1. The Original Steve

    Looks like they've fixed it at last. We have some very unhappy clients - even those with a HA cluster of SBC's at Gamma's end were impacted!

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  2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    The usual "small number" of customers. Has it never occurred to them that from the customer point of view no number of affected customers is small?

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  3. Locky

    We're in the process of migrating to Gamma. Fortunately the sites moved so far didn't seem to be effected, else some very awkward questions would have been raised

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    1. Toltec
      Reply Icon

      @Locky

      We have been using them for a few years now and they have been more reliable than any of our other providers, we place around 150,000 call minutes a month on the circuit. The problem did not affect our circuit, however I saw four emailed updates about the situation come in from them today and it appears the issue was with one of their transit providers not a core problem.

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      1. Lee D Silver badge
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        I'm also about to move our telephony to them, but to be honest there's a reason for that.

        Not one single other SIP Trunk provider could demonstrate a working SIP trunk on our kit. Nothing. Nobody. Most of them weren't interested and the ones that were either didn't follow up, "couldn't arrange it" or just couldn't get it working. We had resellers of everything you've ever heard of, and none of them could demo a working trunk even for a few minutes, even if we paid them to do so.

        Did we have horrible, unusual, kit?

        A basic Mitel box, with SIP Trunk licence, and internal VoIP phones everywhere.

        A proper leased line, guaranteed, with plenty of bandwidth and controls.

        A single, solitary firewall / NAT router / SIP proxy, in the form of a bog-standard Smoothwall box.

        Nobody could get it to work. HipCom trunks seemed especially fussy and I wasted DAYS with engineers on the phone trying to get them to work. SIP proxy enabled, disabled. NAT options enabled, disabled. Port forwards enabled, disabled. I promise you, every POSSIBLE combination of every POSSIBLE option we had available to us - didn't work.

        Got a Gamma trunk after finally convincing our traditional telephony supplier to try and sell us something other than HipCom. Literally ten minutes later, with the same settings available, we were up and making test calls both in and out. In fact, we couldn't actually work out how it worked as there were no port-forwards, no SIP proxying, etc. but it just worked. Rebooted everything to check it wasn't a lingering setting. It still just worked.

        So we made the call to move to the ONLY people who could give us a working trunk. This is after nearly a dozen Mitel telephony partners, who all said they did SIP Trunks, and none of whom could or were willing to even try to demo a single solitary working call.

        (I would never have believed it was so hard. Hell, I plugged in a DrayTel account I had for my home router (a Draytek Vigor) and it worked in and out. I honestly couldn't figure out what the problem was.)

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        1. Anonymous Coward
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          Anonymous Coward

          Mitel ..... and SIP :-)

          I work for an NHS Trust that had tremendous difficulty moving to SIP trunks by BT because BT's engineers could only configure Cisco to Cisco trunks.

          Eventually our Mitel partner provided (and paid for) 4 Mitel Border Gateways to 'fix' their (the partner's) design.

          So, have you now got end to end IP routing from Gamma across your internal network to your handsets or are you using a gateway device to handle that for you?

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    2. Alan Brown Silver badge
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      " else some very awkward questions would have been raised"

      I'd say some very awkward questions need to be raised anyway.

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  4. Chris Harden

    That's a bit of a PC World response -

    "Hey! Timeline on the mobile phone outage?"

    "Sure thing, give us your contact details and we'll CALL YOU"

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