avery's blog

This afternoon, we changed our internal SIP addresses from the @junction.onsip.com domain over to the @junctionnetworks.com domain - so our email addresses and our SIP addresses are synchronized.

Cool, isn't it?

This did cause a 20 minute outage to the Junction Networks internal lines while we migrated our accounts over and re-configured our phones. If you called between 2:15 and 2:35 Eastern Time and got a busy signal, or if you called and nobody picked up the sales/support line, that's the culprit.

Michael Arrington must have Hollywood stardust in his eyes as less than 72 hours after the amazing flameout of SunRocket, TechCrunch is practically in a lather over Ashton Kutcher driven telephony service Ooma .Yes. You heard it right. Ashton Kutcher: Model, "Actor" and Television Producer is now Creative Director of a telecom company. At least, we think it's a telecom company. They don't actually say what exactly it is, other than for $399, you can get "free calls" within the US.

(Originally left as a comment on Om Malik's Gigaom.com website)

Wow - I'm shocked. Not at the fact that SunRocket finally kicked the bucket, but at Om's reaction.

Now, for the sake of full disclosure, I do work for an "Independent VoIP" provider. This is why I find the cry to "Stay Away from Independent VoIP Providers" a little shocking.

The problem isn't that SunRocket was an Independent VoIP Provider, the problem was a losing business model.

For the past few days, we've been debating the whole concept of transport pricing.

One of the things that we think really sets the Junction Networks Hosted PBX (yes - we'll be simplifying that product name soon enough) apart from the competition is our concept of unlimited users. We don't charge any user fees, regardless of if you set up one user or a thousand users within an account. Instead, we charge for value-added services (voicemail, queues, dial by name directories). When it comes to users on the system, when we say unlimited, we mean unlimited.

As part of the overhaul of our Hosted PBX offering, we've been looking at some of our core apps - specifically our Dial by Name Directory. The way it currently works is that someone calls in, types the first characters of the name of the person he or she wants to speak with. Once the user is found, the system spells back the name of the person as confirmation and then connects the call. If you're asking for Bob Smith, waiting for the system to spell out B-O-B-pause-S-M-I-T-H isn't so bad. However, if you're calling for Jean-Louis Davidson, it can start to get a little annoying.

One of our network providers, experienced network issues from 6:30 - 7:15pm Eastern Time. Most of our traffic automatically rolled over to our other network partners but there may have been some isolated issues.

One of the reasons that the phone system has become so integrated into our lives is because it's an open system. To that point, if you pick up the phone, you can dial any phone number (assuming you have the appropriate class of service - such as long distance or international) and it will be connected. You don't have to worry about your friend being on Qwest if you want to call them from your Qwest phone and you don't have to carry four mobile phones - one from each of the major networks - just so you can make sure that you don't miss an important call.

For the past few weeks, we've been quietly working on a plan to create the next iteration of our product line - making it more user friendly (yes - we've been listening to you), easier to set up and much less complicated without losing the flexibility that we hold so close to our hearts.However, to make these changes, it was quickly determined that we would need to update our site framework.