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
Pros:
Cloud based, Instant Provisioning. Excellent Support.
Cons:
Not Twilio's API and robust set of features BUT adequate8.
Would Recommend:
Yes