Flowroute

I worked with Flowroute to setup service for family members and a small business. The setup was relatively easy and system reliability good enough. However, as other solutions came online, I shifted to another provider due to pricing, ease of use and support concerns with Flowroute.

Their support is somewhat responsive, but unhelpful. For example, it is not possible to cancel your account and even after you remove all forms of payment, they will continue to charge a negative balance. They will continue to harass and spam you and leave you with no option to cancel, except to relegate them to your spam folder.

I recommend avoiding Flowroute. A service provider should provide a product they are unafraid of losing customers from because it is outstanding and operates with high, ethical standards. Flowroute is not that company.

OK I rarely review products but after this weekends experience with Flowroute I had to chime in. I HIGHLY, HIGHLY recommend this cloud based SIP trunk service and the team behind it.

SCENARIO: We have a large client relocating buildings. They currently have dedicated SIP trunks and fiber internet provided by Level III-Centurylink. After months of planning, meetings, paperwork\contracts to install equivalent services in the new location we had a failed service delivery date. We need to move in this weekend. We have the fiber internet but the SIP trunks that were supposed to be installed two weeks ago are still not provisioned. Now what??? It’s Friday night and we need to be up and running by Monday???

Solution: We solve the problem like all I.T. guys do. We do some research on cloud-online SIP trunk service providers with instant provisioning. We sign up and create accounts for 5-6 demos (Flowroute, SIP.us, Twilio, Amazon chime, etc.) We reviewed the different features and weighed the pros/cons.

In the end flowroute won our business because:
– The web interface was straight forward and focused towards TELCO
providers
– The core technology is built on AWS’s geographically redundant set ot
services
– Prices were excellent – no contracts or cancellation fees
– ALL basic SIP features such as instant phone number purchasing (DID’s),
e911, T.38 analog fax, cnam caller ID and much more are supported

Short story long, within two hours of signing up for the flowroute service demo we had our client up and running!!!

Here’s how:
– Setup and funded flowroute account
– Purchased 80 new phone lines
– Purchased and setup e911 on necessary lines
– Setup CNAM CallerID
– Setup inbound route by configuring our firewall to accept incoming traffic
from flowroute’s subnets to our internal SIP server
– Setup IP Authentication by providing our outbound public IP address
– Setup new SIP trunk on PBX
– Configured Tech Prefix on PBX – We had to configure PBX to send the
tech prefix and an extra 1 before every call (This is where tech support
came in)

The tech prefix is necessary in order to authenticate your outbound call routing and we were having issues getting this to function. So we called flowroutes tech support. The tech was AMAZING. Knew his service inside and out. Within 5 minutes we were testing, he was reading us off the response from his logs, we were tweaking config based off of his recommendations and then BOOM we were up. Inbound/Outbound phone calls and faxing were all functioning thru our PBX via the fiber internet.

We can not thank them enough for the knowledge and professionalism they shared in that phone call. I truly don’t understand the negative reviews I am seeing about this service!!! YES this type of technology is extremely complicated and some people just cant cut it. But that is not flowroutes fault. Flowroute went above and beyond to solve our clients issue.

In the end we had to call the failed service provider Centurylink and have them forward the old SIP trunk phone numbers to the new flowroute numbers (because of course you cannot forward SIP phone numbers in their web interface) in order to finalize this solution. After two hours, two system engineers, one Telco PBX engineer, one new SIP service provider and a ton of keyboard time we are up and running thanks to flowroute.

Now we just need to complete the phone number porting process and kick Centurylink to the curb thanks to Flowroute.com

I have been with Flowroute for years. In the beginning years, tech support was great and service was great. Something has happened over the last year where they made changes and assumed everyones’ configuration would simply work with server changes, but they have miscalculated much and left several of my customers without service. When contacting their tech support these days, you will get “It is your problem, hire a tech guy to help you connect with our servers”. I am done trying to troubleshoot their issues and will simply move each client that complains to another platform.

Flowroute is a horrible company. Their support SUCKS! I cannot stress that enough! If you ever have an issue, its always on your side. Never their fault, even if you can prove it. I cannot stress to STAY AWAY from these people enough! We have dealt with their support so many times. Calls wont connect, then they will go through suddenly. You call them to investigate it, they could care less. Currently porting all of our numbers OUT of Flowroute!

I have been using Flowroute for 5 years now. They just instituted a new Administrative Fee (As of Nov. 1, 2019) that is costing me $80+ per month. I was notified about the new fee 4 days before I was charge and given no time at all to switch to a new provider. Right now I have a total of $220 per month just in fixed monthly fees that does not go towards anything other than keeping the account open. That is ridiculous. I am now working on moving everything away from Flowroute to a new provider.

Once you give this company money you can go ahead and kiss it good bye. I have had other instances where they charged incorrectly due to poor quality numbers getting spammed so I asked for the money back since they did not have clean phone numbers and they refused. I have also had a similar issue with their texting service and again refused to refund anything due to spam on their so called “Clean Numbers”. I will never be using them again…to many other options out there. No reason to waste your money.

Stay away. This is scam. The worst. You can’t seem to close your account.

We’ve used Flowroute now for a few months and are extremely happy with the service. Compare to others we’ve used, they’ve been the best. I also understand they are an actual carrier now which has made porting very easy in our experience.

The only negative I would say is that as a reseller with multiple customers, we have to create separate Flowroute accounts and billing is a bit of a chore, but those weaknesses are relatively easy to overcome with internal processes and I understand they are working on a multi-account portal.

We tried to port some numbers with FlowRoute, which according to flowroute website were portable. We were exchanging e-mails for a 3-4 days, because the invoices were “outdated” and after 5 days they notified us that the numbers are not even part of their network. (In other words not portable) I don’t want to go to the rest of the story, because it’s more personal, but adding up all the work for scan, e-maling, calling and etc – we lost about 3 hours just to hear “The web site is not very accurate when it comes to DID porting. When you port numbers please call us first”

As someone who has worked with dozens of telcos in my career, FlowRoute has been the hands-down best carrier to work with. Easy to use, friendly staff, reliable, and affordable.

I only wish I could more easily transition over clients who are entrenched with carriers who could care less about addressing issues and maintaining transparency when issues arise.

Flowroute’s customer service cannot be beat. Its team of telecom experts are there to provide the highest quality service and completely remove the frustration and complexity around porting. If you find yourself saying, “There’s got to be a better way!” Look no further than Flowroute.