Customer Support is #1

Hear what our clients are saying....

There is a joke in our office that when I get off the phone with Vintalk Support, the guys here know what I will say…. “I love Jason Shih (Vintalk Customer Support Technician).” He is absolutely wonderful to work with.  When I call in to get Tier 2 Support for our clients, he is always very responsive and attentive in finding solutions to my clients' issues.  Jason’s very professional in a crisis and can quickly identify the cause and the solution.  He takes the time to execute and test the solution with, both, me and the client while we are still on the phone. He never passes the buck whether it’s a Vintalk internal issue or client infrastructure issue.  I never have to worry about waiting for a phone call back at a later time.  I don’t know if it’s good or bad (for Jason) that I have his direct phone number....but I can rest assured that when I do need to contact him, I will get the service and results above and beyond expected.

Jennifer Owen, Information Technology Experts Alliance, LLC.

Meet Jason Shih

Telecommunications Revenue To Hit $2.7 Trillion in 5 Years

About the only time we hear the word trillion is in a gloomy report about the national debt. But here it is in a more positive context: A new report from Insight Research predicts global telecommunications services revenue will grow from $2.1 trillion in 2012 to $2.7 trillion in 2017 at a combined average growth rate of 5.3 percent.

Consumer and business spending for wireless services will continue to fuel the growth, the report says. Wireless subscriber growth, particularly in Asia and other emerging markets, will raise wireless revenues by 64 percent from current levels, Insight forecasts, while wireline revenues show only modest growth. Nearly all of the growth in both sectors is expected to occur in broadband services, with wireless 3G and 4G broadband services projected to grow at a compounded rate of 24 percent over the next five years and wireline broadband services projected to grow at a 13 percent compounded rate over the same span.

"Despite global economic uncertainty, the telecommunications industry is showing strong revenue growth, which is being driven by consumer Internet usage and business mobility solutions. These are enabling new applications," says Fran Caulfield, research director for Insight Research. "Even amidst so much economic uncertainty, the fact remains that telecommunications is a key factor in economic growth. Telecommunications facilitates socio-economic advancement and is a critical utility for economic development, much like water and energy."

Vintalk Geo-Redundant Data Centers in Los Angeles and New York City

In Vintalk's continued efforts to enhance your Vintalk voice experience, we will begin migration of all Vintalk SIP Trunking and Hosted IP PBX accounts to our new geo-redundant data centers located in Los Angeles and New York City effective immediately. For the next two weeks, starting January 16th, we will concentrate on migrating our SIP Trunking customers first, with Hosted IP PBX customers to follow.

All Vintalk SIP Trunking customers are to use the following instructions:

If your physical business address is EAST of the Mississippi River, your account will now be provisioned on our new servers in New York City.  The DNS name is NYSAS.VINTALK.COM, IP Address is: 75.98.35.150  

If your physical business address is located WEST of the Mississippi River, you will be provisioned in our new servers in Los Angeles. The DNS name is: LASAS.VINTALK.COM, IP Address is: 64.94.105.150

STEP-1
Please configure a secondary SIP Trunk or Proxy server within your phone system to point to the appropriate server, as mentioned above. Test and confirm that all inbound and outbound calls are working properly.

STEP-2
Upon confirmation of successful inbound and outbound calling, please contact our customer support team at (Toll free) 1.888.485.0121 or (Main line) 858.546.8039 for the final migration steps and further testing.

DO NOT REMOVE DNS NAMES: 209.203.104.37 AND SANVTH.VINCOMM.NET UNTIL THE VINTALK ENGINEERING TEAM HAS CONFIRMED YOUR SUCCESSFUL MIGRATION AND YOU HAVE BEEN INSTRUCTED TO DO SO.

The Vintalk San Diego data center will officially be taken offline on February 29, 2012.  You are required to schedule your migration with the Vintalk team no later than February 15, 2012, to avoid any interruption of your Vintalk service. We suggest that you contact your local authorized Vintalk Partner and/or preferred phone system vendor to make these modifications within your PBX or phone system.

If you have any questions about our data center migration plan, please call Vintalk customer support at (Toll free) 1.888.485.0121.

Thank you for your continued patronage and for choosing Vintalk.

Sincerely,
The Vintalk Team

Study: UC delivers ROI, but customers still wary

January 5, 2012 — 10:19am ET | By Jim O'Neill

A new study says that potential customers for unified communications continue to struggle to justify the expense of converting to a UC platform, and remain worried they won't see a return on their investment. The good news, according to International Data Corporation? Once a company commits to deploy a UC solution, the technology delivers.

IDC analyst Rich Costello, who wrote IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Unified Communications Voice Infrastructure 2011-2012 Vendor Analysis, said educating potential customers is critical.

"It's an ongoing effort for customers to understand and identify appropriate business cases for UC and the overall complexities associated with it," he said. "But, once that connection is made, UC delivers."

Costello said UC vendors should continue to focus on developing incremental business use cases to build confidence among customers and drive investments in UC. Vendors and partners must also focus on the business case, and not just the technical aspects, of a fully integrated UC environment.

Costello said that for the segment to continue its growth, vendors need to help customers identify tools and features that are most appropriate for their organization, and which sources they should turn to for those selected features and tools, adding that a business case for UC has to include a mix of IT and business benefits.

He also pointed to vertical markets such as healthcare, education, financials and manufacturing as some of the most powerful UC customer success stories to emanate from business process flows.

IDC named Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) and Avaya  in its "leaders" category among vendors, with Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU), Siemens, NEC, IBM, and ShoreTel (Nasdaq: SHOR), recognized as "major players."

For more:
 - see this release

Logitech rolls out webcam for 1080p video calling

Vintalk Gets in to the Mobile Business

Flat-rate, unlimited mobile plans with no hidden fees or contracts.

San Diego, CA – December 13, 2011 – Vintalk, a global provider of wholesale, business and consumer IP communication services, announced today that it is getting into the mobile business by offering flat-rate, unlimited mobile plans.

Vintalk Mobile plans start at $39.95/month and include unlimited voice, unlimited voice+text, and unlimited voice+text+data.  Data plans include 3G and 4G. The plans are available for just about any mobile phone including: iPhones, most Smartphones, and Blackberry.  Best of all, Vintalk Mobile customers can save up to 50% on their current mobile bill.

“We’ve been keeping a close eye on the mobile market.  Our experience in unified communications (UC) with Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has given us a deeper understanding of the advantages mobile technology plays in the telecommunications arena, said Scott Goodwin, CEO of Vintalk. “Additionally, entrance into mobile allows customers to leverage our international network and low international rates.”

Flat-rate, unlimited plans are enticing for businesses and accounting departments.  Vintalk Mobile has no contracts, no hidden fees, and customers can “bring your own phone (BYOP).”  CFOs appreciate Vintalk’s single-source billing option because it allows them to just add the cost to their current Vintalk phone bill.  In addition to single-source billing, the flat-rate plans allow for easier monthly budgeting and reconciliation.  Not only do companies save money, but also save time by not having to deal with the hassle of reimbursing each individual mobile user. No contract also means that companies can add and subtract users as needed.

“Market research shows that consumers are moving away from traditional mobile plans, and looking for more innovative ways to meet their increasing needs and decreasing budgets,” said Reb Risty, VP of Marketing for Vintalk. “Individuals have been taking advantage of flat-rate, unlimited plans at a rapid rate, so why not businesses.  We’ve identified a valuable savings proposition and are excited to be providing it to our customers.”

 

 

 

What features are included in Vintalk Business Voice & Data Services?

What features are included in Vintalk Business Voice & Data Services?

Vintalk Business Voice & Data Service offers an extensive standard set of Class-5 features as well as enhanced services like, FindMe/FollowMe, Unified Messaging, MS Outlook direct dialing, soft phone support, voicemail, conference calling, web triggered calling, internet fax with Web portal administration, international mobile calling and long distance services.

Avaya says SIP growth leads to new revenue strategy

From Fierceenterprise Communications, By Jim O'Neill

Avaya last week reminded attendees at its U.S./Gov Sales Leadership and Partner Conference that it has rolled out 60 products in the past year and a half, more than it has seen in the past 10 years. And, it said, more products are on the way, including plans to take its Flare collaboration platform to Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Android mobile devices, and to make its Aura Conferencing product more feature-rich. Avaya, which has been gaining share on Cisco in the telephony equipment segment, has been reminding partners, in strong terms, that it wants them to focus more on its broader technology portfolio and on collaboration and user experience. It's a revenue growth plan that it has been pitching at all of its recent channel partner conferences. Alan Baratz, Avaya's SVP and president of Global Communications Solutions, says the push is predicated upon the continued growth of SIP technologies. "The important and compelling thing about SIP is that it's all about sessions: it can carry the IP, it can carry video, it can carry IM, maybe other new types of traffic," he said. "It means you can have a single control infrastructure supporting all of that communication. That enables a lot of really compelling capabilities for the end customer," including cheaper infrastructure, and a more unified experience for the end user. "Up until now, for Avaya, it really has been all about voice," Baratz said. "But now, on the same platform, we can do video, we can do web collaboration, we can do IM, everything, so we need to start investing in those other modes of communication. Video codecs become more important to us. Screen sharing becomes more important to us. It's really about the different types of communication and the technologies required to support those modes.

Get the biggest bang for your buck with SIP Trunking.

There are many different flavors of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Trunking out there in the market, today, and believe me, some are better value than others. Key service elements to look for from a reputable SIP Trunking service provider are:

• Unlimited calling plans
• Unlimited inbound call paths
• Load balancing across multiple sites
• Remote Call Forwarding (RCF) for disaster recovery

Unlimited calling plans – Make sure the SIP Trunking provider offers you unlimited outbound and unlimited inbound calling plans. As businesses become more globalized, the cost advantages of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) are hard to ignore.  Having an unlimited international calling plan can really pay dividends for global companies.  

Unlimited inbound call paths – Don’t fall prey to the same old Public Switching Telephone Network (PSTN) approach of a one-to-one ratio on SIP trunks. Make sure you ask your Internet Telephony Service Provider (ITSP) about its inbound call paths and what limitations or restrictions are placed upon the call paths. Having unlimited inbound call paths allows a business to reduce the total number of SIP Trunks it requires for concurrent outbound calling.  This saves the customer up to 50% on the monthly service charges in most cases. The only limitations to the amount of inbound calling that can be received are the capability of the PBX and internet bandwidth. Inbound call centers need not apply!

Load balancing across multiple sites – Companies with multiple locations can gain an extreme cost advantage by leveraging load balancing with its SIP Trunks. This advantage is especially effective when the companies are geographically dispersed. For example, if all company locations are relatively the same size but located in the United Kingdom, New York, Dallas, and Los Angeles, they could effectively use one pool of trunks between all locations since peak periods of utilization would be time zone specific. This configuration can result in a significant cost savings by strategically reducing the overall required trunk count to three times less than normal Plain Old Telephone Service (POTs).

RCF for disaster recovery – VoIP is a great technology when all of the pieces of the puzzle come together. Have the battle is making sure the customer’s Local Area Network (LAN) is in good health. If mission critical phone services are required, look to multiple Quality of Service (QoS) policies to be applied to ensure optimum voice quality.

What happens when your internet circuit goes down? What happens to your valued customer’s inbound calls when the circuit goes down? What happens if the IP PBX server goes down? The truth is, you are dead in the water, and your phones stop ringing. That is why when looking at SIP Trunking services for your company, you must insist on including disaster recovery or an RCF solution. Once the circuit is down or the service platform loses registration with the IP PBX, the platform will or should automatically failover to another designated number and route all inbound calls to that Direct Inward Dial (DID). That number could be another business location, an answering service, a hosted auto-attendant, or even a mobile phone number. Remember, dead air is certain death for businesses.

SIP Trunking is a solid VoIP technology service that every business, large or small, should consider now or in the immediate future. Cost and operating efficiencies are abundant. If you are leaning in this direction, make sure you ask about these key features to ensure your successful migration from Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) to SIP.  In the end, you’ll be glad that you did.

Jayson Jones
SVP Business Development, Vintalk

SIP Savvy Checklist - 5 Questions to Ask Your Customer

SIP Savvy Checklist:

These are 5 questions to ask your customer before recommending SIP Trunking as a solution.

1. Are you going to change all your lines to SIP trunks?   
1. This will determine how much bandwidth the customer will need to reserve for the SIP trunking service. Round up to 100k per call.
2. Fax-over-SIP works to a point.  If the customer sends or receives more than three or four pages, you may want to keep the fax on a Plain Old Telephone Service (POTs) line.
3. Alarm lines and credit cards still require a POTs line.
2. How many simultaneous calls do you need?
1. At Vintalk we only limit the outbound call paths. The only limitations on inbound calls are the customer’s available bandwidth and the capabilities of their phone system.
2. Don’t forget to include conferencing in your review of the network.  If the business has multiple people calling out to a conference bridge, each of those calls uses an outbound call path.
3. Will you get both the internet and the SIP trunks from the same provider?
1. If the customer supplies the internet (BYOB – bring your own bandwidth) the SIP provider is at the mercy of the BYOB provider. If the customer has quality issues, the SIP trunks will have quality issues.
2. If Vintalk provides both the bandwidth and the SIP trunks, we make sure the bandwidth is provisioned with Quality of Service (QoS) to give the voice traffic priority and ensure the best possible call quality for the customer.
4. Will the provider offer any equipment like an edge router or other edge device?
1. A SIP-friendly router will help control the connection and ensure that the voice traffic is taking precedence over all other traffic leaving the local area network.
2. With the Vintalk Voice Router we can monitor the customer’s connection and be alerted whenever quality issues may arise.
5. Is the phone system compatible with SIP?
1. If the customer’s phone system is more than five years old, chances are it is not compatible without a major upgrade, if that is even possible.
2. Vintalk does provide SIP Gateways that will allow the customer to continue to use their old phone system and take advantage of the cost savings of SIP.
3. If the phone system is SIP ready, make sure that you have tested it and it is compatible with Vintalk’s service.

Be sure to compare long distance rates, international long distance rates, per minute charges vs. monthly bundle, monthly Direct Inward Dial numbers (DID) charges, and E911 compatibility.

There are a number of other things to consider when moving to SIP trunks, but the above should give you a good starting point.

Ken Adams, COO, Vintalk