September 12, 2007 by admin.

Well i’m making calls on my iPhone with carrier CelTel in Honduras Central America and it works great. Adios AT&T. No hardware hack all software thanks to the folks at the iPhone Dev WiKi. 

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September 12, 2007 by admin.

I have been in sales for 15 years now last 10 or so selling Cisco in Central America and after Millions of dollars in sales i have learned a few things. Some of my biggest sales and long term friendships have come from customers that have purchased something a system or a large network and had problems with the technology. If as a sales engineer i get that customer through the difficult times and make their network really work really shine for their business i have something much more then my commission and our company has something much more then a sale, we have their trust. I learned form the onset in sales, sell to the decision maker/owner. But my goal is always to have the trust and confidence of the business owner. The way i’ve been able to achieve that is make it work. I sold, at one point, the largest IP Telephony network in Central America to a company. They had like 22 factories and thousands of employees. The company was run by the owner’s son’s and they managed various factories. One day i got a call from the owner (he was like in his early 70’s and not very big on technology) he was yelling at me about the network and how it did not work, you can imagine.. I caught the first flight i could to meet with him later that afternoon. In the meeting he was showing me how his fancy IP phone was crap. As he would dial he lifted his hand about a foot away from the phone and slammed his finger down, then he would say, “see the damn thing doesn’t work”. I could see right away what the problem was, so i want to Radio Shack a got one of those phones with big buttons and connected it to an ATA. He was happy…. We have continued to do business for years.

My point is work with your customers and your customer is really yours.

I have yet to speak to someone in Nextone management about all the problems we have been facing because of their flawed software, maybe we are not the biggest customer but we will have six thousand ports by the end of 2007 and doing close to 100 million min. monthly.  I can’t understand anyone in sales/management that would pass up that opportunity it’s almost a crime.

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September 12, 2007 by admin.

With regard to Nextone’s latest release 4.3:

Let’s start with some of the good points:

The Nextone 4.3 RSM is a world apart with its intended capabilities from 4.0. We have the ability to stream rated cdr’s (i can choose what rating fields and where to put them) to a wide selection of databases. This gives us the ability to use a much less sophisticated and costly billing solution. It can even stream to a flat file. The RSM can check routing and really call flow for errors and correct them. Routes without rates, dead routes and so on. It has a full business reporting module for route profit analysis. Full alarming module that let’s me create custom actions for custom events along with a slew of pre-defined events pertinent to our business. I am sure the Nextone sales team has explained all the benefits. 

We have the LCR module and its core are 7 files.

First file is Periods where we define routing and billing periods. We are using a 24 hour 7 day a week period but that could be broken down to different periods to maximize profit. Regions where i define our Country Codes and Dial codes for each region and define a “name” for that region. So if there are 200 codes for Honduras i break that down to HONDO-FIXED, HONDO-MEGATEL, HONDO-CELTEL and HONDO-CLEC. This makes it simpler to define routing. There is an ANI file that can be placed in the system to do ANI routing. Then there are the 4 core files we work with daily Customer rates, Customer routes, Supplier Rates and Supplier Routes. For us those files are not that difficult to manipulate because we are only focusing on about 10 to 15 routes besides Honduras and the Philippines. Each file is only 2 to 300 rows and less then 10 or so columns. Once the data is in the system they have a basic web based management tool. You will need to review it to see if it fits your needs i really do not think it would. Which means you would need another database to just manage those files. You also would need to see how long it would take to update routing. 

Things that are not functioning:

1. Basic switching from the 4.0 version (rock solid) to 4.3 it resets (core) quite a bit. It seems that there is a stability issue.
2. CDR reporting does not report correctly on any report in the system if you need to look at failed calls for an hour or want to review CDR’s for any reason (i do daily).
3. I cannot easily see active calls per customer - i need to use a command line tool and get a report on a per customer basis. They have a tool to do this but it is not working.
4. RSM console (where i manage endpoints) fails to load occasionally. This error has not come up lately - might have been fixed in 4.3m1.
5. Adding users doesn’t work - again- might have been fixed in 4.3m1.
6. We are seeing daily hung calls in the system. Not in the cdr’s but it uses a port on the Nextone.
7. Documentation is poor if not all together incorrect. Regions file fields are completely wrong (luckily they followed the old format).
8. Importing the routing files into the server sometimes does not work. Or to get it to take the file and erase the existing info, i had to import a routing file with one line then update that with the full file- that got it to work.
9. Call Trace and call hunt do not work on the GUI - they do work on the CLI.
10. Support is very good but they are new to the system and with all the errors - i just get the feeling they are overloaded.

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