Welcome to our Frequently Asked Questions and news list! We post here answers to support questions that tend to arise repeatedly as well as news of interest. Check it regularly or subscribe to updates by email. |
Answers
Disconnection Sting with Ping
Ping is a great utility we have previously mentioned in troubleshooting call quality and choosing the best server (or POP). It can also be used to determine whether you lose Internet connectivity. One area where it could be very useful is determining whether your device is losing internet connectivity while idle - as suggested in troubleshooting incoming calls at 7. More precisely, if you are not receiving incoming calls (i.e., your softphone does not "ring"), you might want to check whether your connectivity is interrupted or disappears. The simplest way would be to issue this command in a command prompt: ping -t www.google.com > myconmon.txt That will continuously ping Google (who replies with another packet) and will keep track of packets lost. When Google stops replying you know that the Internet connection is broken or interrupted. The -t switch will ping continuously (otherwise only 4 pings are made). We choose Google servers because they are high availability and very reliable. Finally, we save the output to a text file so that we can find it later because we want to track the connection over time; you can change the name of the file and might want to add a path in front of it so that you can find it later. We can stop the command in Windows by pressing Ctrl + C. At the end (after pressing Ctrl+C) ping will output lost packets as a percentage. If you have any lost packets at all you can safely conclude that your connection was interrupted. Needless to say, the above is a very simple way to monitor the network performance, but it has the advantage of working on most devices. You can customize it or see other customizations in our server choice answer. However, most modern operating systems come with more advanced and easier to use tools for such an endeavor and additional tools are available for free or with a free trial option. In Windows, we have the included "resource monitor" (just search for it) or more advanced solutions for network monitoring such as network performance monitor. There is even a Chrome extension, an obsolete solution, embattled SolarWinds has an IP monitor Free edition, smokeping/mrtg/vaping, cachet w/ monitor, Java program. |
US Robocalls in the Economist
Despite a consumer backlash, it's unlikely that the Trump Administration can or wants to do anything. In Europe, GDPR has caused an exodus of advertisers and "Google Consolidation". Far from being effective, CRTC's rules of opt-in consent have similarly impeded small businesses with high costs of compliance, resulting in numerous casualties. PoF, a freemium online dating site given as example in the previous link, ended swallowed up by one of its less successful but more expensive and better funded competitors. Which suggests that FCC's "laissez-fair" approach in this matter may be a blessing in disguise.  Most commercial robocalls have been illegal since 1991, when Congress passed the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. In 2012 the FCC banned telemarketers from making robocalls to consumers without prior written consent and eliminated a loophole allowing companies to robocall consumers with whom they have an “established business relationship”, causing a temporary lull in complaints. Despite successful cases against legitimate firms like Bank of America and Sallie Mae, federal regulators have struggled to stop shady outfits. Auto-diallers allow fraudsters to blast out millions of calls at little cost; “spoofing” software disguises their identities. After robocaller phone numbers are identified and black-listed, new ones pop up in their place. Many robocalling operations are based overseas and beyond the authorities’ reach. Some firms have joined the fight. In 2016 a group of over 30 carriers and technology companies including AT&T, Verizon, Apple and Alphabet formed a “strike force” to take on the robocall scourge. Dozens of mobile apps claim to block scammers. Whether the White House will join the assault remains to be seen. History suggests that Donald Trump may not be a steadfast soldier. “I did lots of robocalls” for political campaigns, Mr Trump bragged to the Daily Mail, a British newspaper, after the 2014 mid-term elections. “Everybody I did a robocall for won.” (via Economist) |
Landline Redirect Scam
The "quirk" abused in this case is the fact that a landline does not fully disconnect on hangup, but rather "waits" 10-30 seconds, as required to ensure that call waiting or call conferencing features are not being activated.
(CTV) |
Free Phone Service with FreedomPop
While Google Voice has provided free phone calls and texting in North America for a while now, other providers have started to similarly allow for such free calls not only in North America, but also around the world. FreedomPop is one such provider, allowing for this on their app. It is however possible to obtain the SIP credentials and configure calling with any SIP softphone, such as Zoiper. The following instructions appeared on a forum and though we have not tested them, we are republishing them for anyone interested. Requirements:
Why do this:
Limitations:
Steps:
Important note for dialing: dialing out to Canada/USA requires 11 digit dialing (1[NPA][NXX]XXXX). Overseas calling is "011[country code]xxx...." I have scripted a dial plan that will work with Cisco/Linksys ATA's / sip phones: This dial plan will allow ten digit dialing (meaning if you call Canada/US without putting the "1" at the beginning, the dial plan will do that for you). Also allowing overseas calls. If you call a country that isn't included in the overseas calling list, the call simply won't be connected. List of countries you can call free with this service on their forum. (via rfd) |
Next Generation 911 Service in Canada
It’s going to take a lot more than new regulations to allow all Canadians to send urgent, life-and-death text and video messages to emergency call centres, say advocates of so-called next-generation 911 services. Organizations, including the Canadian Interoperability Technology Interest Group, say a hearing this week by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission into expanding 911 service across the country is just the beginning of what’s needed to upgrade services to take advantage of new technologies. Police services will need to train their 911 operators to deal with an influx of text messages and the potentially disturbing pictures and videos likely to be relayed by witnesses and victims alike, says CITIC executive director Eric Torunski. (via Next-generation 911: CRTC braces for emergency video and texting - The Globe and Mail) |
Discord VoIP service used to deliver malware
The Register reports that an app used by gamers mostly for voice conversations has been used to deliver malware. Their service is quite different from ours, being more complex and targeting only gamers. We rely mostly on the open SIP protocol and we do not offer the kind of chat services used by maleficent parties in the Discord attack.
(via tr) |
Level 3 outage caused by misconfigured switches
Backbone provider Level3 says an outage that knocked out VoIP service for much of the US Tuesday morning was the result of improperly configured equipment.  It seems the outage, which smashed call services offline for much of the country, was not the result of any fiber cuts or facility damage, but rather some classic bad switch settings. As the network provider returned operations to normal, customers received a technical note from Level3, seen by The Register, describing the issue and its resolution:
To us, this sounds like Level3 – or a partner – misconfigured its network equipment to drop voice traffic. We asked the carrier if that was the case, and we were told the following: On October 4, our voice network experienced a service disruption affecting some of our customers in North America due to a configuration error. We know how important these services are to our customers. As an organization, we’re putting processes in place to prevent issues like this from recurring in the future. We were able to restore all services by 9:31am Mountain time. Make of that what you will. Updated to addHere's some more detail on the cock-up from Level 3 – the backbone biz has forwarded to us this advisory it sent out to customers:
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Northern Canada satellite-induced telecom outage
The Telesat Anik F2 satellite stopped working around 5 p.m. ET Sunday, resulting in a widespread service outage, but internet and phone services in parts of Northern Canada started returning Monday. Phone and internet services have been restored in all satellite-served northern communities after problems with a Telesat satellite disrupted communications in a wide swath of northern Quebec and Nunavut on Sunday afternoon. After about 19 hours, debit and credit services in much of Nunavut are finally back online, as is RCMP dispatch. "There was a major inconvenience for our customers, but thank god in the last 10 minutes things are up and running and we're ready to go," said Jim Jones, manager of Arctic Ventures Marketplace in Iqaluit. The Telesat Anik F2 satellite cut out around 5 p.m. ET Sunday. That knocked out internet in most of Nunavut as well as in seven communities in the N.W.T. and Old Crow in Yukon. A 'technical anomaly'In a statement, Northwestel said the satellite, which helps provide cellphone and internet service to communities across the North, experienced a "technical anomaly" that resulted in loss of services. The outage would also have impacted ATMs and aircraft in some communities, said John Flaherty, vice-president of marketing for Telesat, early Monday morning. The satellite provides service to providers such as Northwestel, SSi Micro, Shaw Direct, Xplornet, Bell Mobility and U.S. satellite internet provider Wildblue. Internet in most of the 25 Nunavut communities serviced by SSi Micro's Qiniq network went down, the company said in a news release Monday. Qiniq customers in Iqaluit, Cambridge Bay and Rankin Inlet were not affected, the company said. "These three communities have access to service from two satellites, Anik F2 and Anik F3, providing customers a redundant 'backup' link and additional capacity," said the release. That created some confusing situations, for example, people in Iqaluit could make calls between cellphones, and from landline to landline, but not from a cellphone to a landline. That left the territory relying on backup satellite phones to keep in touch with hamlets. Cause still under investigationShaw Direct said in a tweet early Monday the outage was creating a signal issue for its French stations and HD channels. It said "the affected satellite performed emergency movements for reasons that are currently under investigation." Shaw estimates service will be restored at 11:30 a.m. ET. A problem with the same satellite in 2011 grounded flights across the North and affected internet, cellphone and bank machine services. Flaherty said this is "definitely not" the same problem as 2011. "We still haven't ascertained what caused the issue. We have a working theory, but at this point it would be speculation. It's too early to say." On Monday morning, Flaherty said the company was on track to have all service restored by noon. Customers affected by the service interruption tweeted out their displeasure with the situation. With files from CBC's Steve Rukavina |
CDR and Our Commitment To Your Privacy
We occasionally get requests from our customers to not "log" their calls on our servers. The short answer is we do not record the voice content of your calls (see our call recording answer) but we do keep track of incoming and outgoing calls (i.e., their duration and the destination of outgoing calls) for billing purposes, as disclosed in our privacy statement. We take our customers' privacy seriously and we make it easy to deal with telemarketers and unwanted callers. The aforementioned data (call duration and destination) is called CDR, which is short for Call Detail Records. This data is generated by exchanges for billing purposes. You can find more general info about it on Wikipedia or a more technical article on voip-info. We make your CDR available to you in the Control Panel. CDR data is essential to VoIP billing. Virtually every VoIP provider uses it for revenue generation. In EZvoip case, we lease lines and time from upstream providers and resell it to our customers. We are charged based on CDR data and we charge our customers mostly at cost (sometimes at a small loss, sometimes at a small profit, but we balance it out in the end). Without this data, we would be open to either being taken advantage of, with a client who overuses our service while underpaying, or we could be charging more than we pay our upstream provider, compromising our commitment to charge at cost while in beta stage. We also use this data to create plans that better respond to our customers' needs and to keep plan costs in sync with usage. Encrypting calls, a feature provided with some softphones, prevents regular snooping on your conversations by third parties, much like using GPG with email safeguards your privacy. However, your provider still has the direct your phone calls to the right number, much like your email has to reach its destination, and as such, records (i.e., metadata) / CDR is generated and stored. This is true of any telephony or email provider. If an email provider were to delete such data after sending the email, or if you were to delete the sent email from the Sent folder, this data would continue to exist on servers upstream, servers that had taken the email based on its address info and sent it along. The same is true with VoIP. We do not know of any VoIP provider to claim that they do not generate CDR data to protect customer privacy and we suspect that if any one provider makes such a claim, they are being disingenuous. While a VoIP provider could choose to not disclose CDR data to their customers, they cannot eliminate it from their upstream provider servers - and there is always an upstream provider or partner, as phone numbers are not generated or assigned out of thin air. We will minimally cooperate with law enforcement requests - i.e., we will provide the minimum amount of data we are legally required to provide, so that we do not incur adverse consequences, but it's unlikely that law enforcement would even request anything from us since they can go to some upstream provider with whom they are likely to have a pre-existing relationship. The same is true of virtually any VoIP reseller. Not complying with such requests (e.g., a court-ordered subpoena) would jeopardize the privacy of our other customers and may even endanger our survival as a business. To summarize our position on the collection of data, we do collect metadata (call length and destination) for billing purposes, it is stored securely and we have never sold it in the past nor will we in the future sell it to a spammer or anything like that. If you want to make and receive calls anonymously with VoIP, with any provider, you would have to pay for it anonymously (some free services exist, but they might be logging even more data and selling it along to marketers or advertisers). Some claim that it may be possible to pay anonymously with Bitcoin. Additionally, you would have to ensure that the email address you use to register cannot be traced back to you. That is far more difficult than you would think and even familiarity with TOR does not guarantee it. Finally, keep in mind that someone with full access to your CDR and email flow metadata (that is definitely not us) might be able to ascertain (guess) your identity from that alone. |
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