Bruce Chatterley, CEO
Posted September 1st, 2010 in Broadband, Covad, MegaPath, Security, Speakeasy, Voice (VoIP)
In June we announced that we were in the process of merging with Covad and MegaPath to form a single business. I am proud to announce that the merger has officially closed.
As we merge our three companies into a united and cohesive entity, you may notice some renovations on our site and our brand. One thing that will not change is the high level of customer support you have come to depend on. For the most part, it’s business as usual, with just one major change: the variety of products our customers will have access to. With the combination of three leading companies, the new MegaPath will provide you with a complete voice, access, private networking and managed security, including new products such as MPLS VPN and Security services, which just launched today.
For more information about the merger, please read our press release or our FAQ section on our site.
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Arnaud Gautier, Vice President Product Solutions
Posted August 5th, 2010 in Broadband, Speakeasy, Voice (VoIP)
When businesses decide to purchase new phones and voice services for their office, they often don’t want to hear about QoS, priority routing or Managed VLANs; they just want a guarantee that when they pick up their phone to make or answer a call, they will have crystal clear phone connections, every single time.
Yet, determining how service providers maintain Quality of Service (QoS) for their voice traffic should be one of the first things a potential purchaser asks a VoIP provider, since IP voice services require more careful planning and coordination through the data network than standard office applications such as web browsing, email or file transfer. Without a deep understanding of the data path used by the voice service, and how this path is protected against other sources of traffic, a Voice over IP provider is in fact defenseless when faced with quality of service issues. Companies should make sure their phone provider is as concerned with quality as they are and can deliver this toll-level quality on every call.
Speakeasy’s Voice Quality solutions solve the problem of keeping voice service over the Internet reliable through some of the industry’s highest QoS standards, which include:
-Prioritizing traffic at traditional information bottlenecks within our core data network.
-A private dedicated IP network which allows us to control and monitor internal voice traffic and guarantee clear, uninterrupted voice services.
-Edge and customer premise routers configured to prioritize voice traffic over data on the last mile to a customer.
-Careful data and voice planning prior to installation to make sure both voice quality and data transfer needs will be properly performed.
-Guarantees that no voice traffic is passed over to a public peering point or a third party data network without guaranteed voice protection.
-Hardware and software monitoring and troubleshooting tools that allow us to understand which network hop and what traffic source is contributing to quality issues, to resolve any voice issue even before the customer reports a quality issue.
For more information on Speakeasy’s Voice Quality technology and voice services please read our white paper.
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Ben Morgan, VP Customer Operations
Posted July 22nd, 2010 in Speakeasy, Voice (VoIP)
The cost savings associated with VoIP services are well documented. A recent report from Frost & Sullivan analyst group reports that more and more businesses are acknowledging the up-front and long-term cost savings VoIP services afford them. A lesser known, but just as important benefit of Hosted Voice is alleviating the administrative burden of linking multiple offices, and being nimble enough to easily scale when new employees or offices are introduced to the system.
One customer of ours, Playworks, is a prime example. A non-profit organization that brings safe, healthy, and inclusive play opportunities to low-income schools across the country, Playworks has more than 300 employees at their Oakland, CA headquarters and seven branch locations nationwide. Before moving to Speakeasy, Playworks had a PBX at their headquarters, key systems at each branch office, and separate connectivity and phone bills from different providers in every location.
With Hosted Voice, Playworks was able to bring all their voice and data under one umbrella, with one bill each month. What’s more, because there is no PBX on site, it’s easy and affordable to scale as the company grows. By the end of 2012, Playworks expects to expand to more than 750 employees in 27 US cities.
For more information watch the video of Playworks, or read the full case study.
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Eric Beller, Director of Sales Engineering
Posted July 19th, 2010 in Voice (VoIP)
Once again, we have extended our Free Phone promotion, offering Polycom SoundPoint IP 321 VoIP-enabled phones to new business customers who purchase unlimited or global Hosted Voice calling plans and have a minimum of five lines. We originally introduced this promotion in March and have decided to extend the offer through the end of August.
If you’ve been thinking of switching to VoIP, not only is now the right time because of this promotion (who wouldn’t want free phones?), but summer time is an especially ripe opportunity to see just how the features associated with Hosted Voice can benefit your business.
With employees and executives spending more time away from the office during the summer, Hosted Voice can help them stay connected and productive. Features such as Remote Office allow people to use their corporate number on any phone while enjoying reduced calling rates for long distance. Find Me/Follow Me allows customers to find their main contact regardless of where they are located.
Read our press release for more information about the free phone promo, or read our white paper to learn more about the benefits of Hosted Voice in a distributed and mobile workforce.
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Nicholas Clapper, Hosted Voice Product Manager
Posted July 14th, 2010 in Speakeasy, Voice (VoIP)
Faxing over IP based telephone service (or FoIP as it is sometimes called) has forever been a challenge, primarily due to the fact that IP calls require the analog sounds to first be digitized into data packets and then sent over an IP network. While this works well for voice, this process can be very disruptive to the data stream of a fax machine.
The first issue is whether the voice over IP provider is using compression as part of the analog to digital conversion process. Compression, like its name implies, is great for reducing the amount of data required to transmit sound. It does this by dropping the less critical sounds, often at the extreme high or low frequencies. This is fine for conversations, but fax machines require the transmission and receipt of all sounds in order to function, necessitating the use of an uncompressed conversion process.
The second issue is how well the IP network is managed. For standard data traffic, IP packets can be delayed, arrive out of order, or even be retransmitted if dropped and never affect the user’s experience. When sending voice across a data network, all three of those items must be managed closely or the user will experience degraded sound quality in the form of echo, garbling, one-way audio, and in extreme cases, dropped calls. Add to that the sensitivity of fax machines to any disruption in the analog data stream, and it becomes clear how challenging faxing over IP can be.
One solution was the development of the T.38 fax transmission standard. Essentially, the T.38 standard duplicates some data from the previous packet in each packet sent, so that if a packet is dropped or received out of order, the remaining packets have enough information to reconstruct the original audio stream accurately without it. This process significantly improves fax success when used in networks with noticeable packet loss and other network problems.
At Speakeasy, we provide QoS (Quality of Service) and minimize the disruptive factors of packet loss, jitter and latency on the network. Our network is clean and our voice and data customers rarely need to use T.38 (though we will offer it as a support tool, primarily for voice customers not using our data network, beginning in late August of this year).
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Mike Gruszka, Director, Voice Services
Posted July 7th, 2010 in Speakeasy, Voice (VoIP)
As Speakeasy has recently extended our free phone promotion through the end of July – offering free IP telephones to new subscribers of Hosted Voice services – we thought it would be a good time to provide some refreshers on how to best choose a VoIP service and phone.
The first questions to ask are:
1. What are my phone system options?
2. What exactly is VoIP?
3. Is hosted voice right for my business?
Traditional phone systems utilize a PBX, which is an automated switchboard, or other method on location to route calls. These systems generally require a large up-front investment for hardware to be installed at the office location. VoIP, or Voice over Internet Protocol, allows voice calls to travel over computer networks instead of traditional phone lines, eliminating the need for extensive hardware in the office, and reducing overall costs of phone calls. Businesses that are looking for a system that is easily maintained without a lot of overhead costs, especially those with mobile workers, would be best suited to VoIP services.
Once a business has determined that they want to implement VoIP, the next step is determining what functionality your business model requires out of the phones, and what your budget can afford. When speaking to a provider potential customers should ask:
4. How do you ensure call quality?
5. What happens if my connectivity goes down or my power goes out?
6. How can these calling features help my business?
7. What will it cost?
8. How will you ensure a smooth transition?
9. What about maintenance, administration and scaling?
10. What kind of customer support and training do you provide?
By getting the answers to these ten questions, businesses can accurately determine what type of VoIP services, from which provider, are a best fit for their company. VoIP technology can help lower costs and simplify the management of phone systems, enabling small businesses to have a complete communications system without breaking the budget.
For more information, check out our white paper on the topic.
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Nicola Onychuk, Senior Engineering Project Manager
Posted June 23rd, 2010 in Speakeasy
In order to support Speakeasy’s custom services and applications, our engineering team creates, deploys and operates hundreds of individual and virtualized servers. Maintaining consistency among builds is a discipline known as System Configuration Management. A configuration management system saves us time, because we’re now able to replicate a build within minutes rather than days or even weeks.
Usually, there are three stages of building a server. “Bare metal” often refers to installing the operating system; then comes a basic system configuration; then the pieces that define what kind of “job” the server will perform.
Without a configuration management tool, this stack of parts would be built using a variety of tools and customizations every time a new server was needed. This is subject to individual “craft” and minor style differences each time, which can lead to inconsistency. Speakeasy’s Engineering team has used a variety of approaches over the years but has recently taken a quantum step ahead with the open-sourced tool from Puppet Labs called Puppet.
Speakeasy’s use of Puppet is among the more complex deployments, with multiple locations, multiple environments, and multiple connectivity constraints. Another unique aspect of how Speakeasy is using Puppet is the implementation of a promotion-based workflow, where the server-level code, like the application level code, is tested in stages and moved from a lab environment through stricter controls and then into production. This translates to better uptime and shorter deployment cycles for cool new stuff.
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Eric Beller, Director of Sales Engineering
Posted June 17th, 2010 in Speakeasy, Voice (VoIP)
Many small businesses rely on IT professionals to help them make decisions regarding their IT plans, whether technical in nature or on the business side. Here at Speakeasy, IT professionals talk with us regarding their customers and possible communication solutions we can both offer together. These decisions translate into designing networks that scale and also are the foundation for a successful implementation with Speakeasy. Communication is the lifeblood to any business. It’s no different with small businesses today, which like their “Big Business” counterparts rely on their IT networks to work efficiently while scaling for the future and realizing the return on investment.
In this 3 part series, I will cover a list of best practices to be used as a guide to successfully move to VoIP. The process can be broken down into three steps:
1) IT Assessment
2) Network Considerations
3) Validating Your Decision
Lets examine the first step: the IT Assessment.
Understanding what you have is important, whether you possess this knowledge yourself or you hire an IT Professional to identify this. Make sure you take inventory of what is in the network, including servers, switches, routers and telephones. It’s helpful to know what can be re-purposed when considering a new technology move like VoIP.
Next, you should know what applications are being used and how they are being used. Today’s applications aren’t just constrained to a local computer or server and many now require a network to operate. The Internet has changed the landscape of many applications. The more applications you run within the network, the more strain it can add. This is why you need to design a network that meets application performance! The impact could be costly in dollars and also satisfaction with employees, vendors and customers. Having a network that is over-used or outdated can cause many business owners to lose sleep at night. Understanding the applications and how they are used is a key ingredient in what drives the network design, especially when sizing out bandwidth. When using VoIP over the network, you just added another critical business application, which will need the appropriate bandwidth to operate. Sizing up the network and designing the proper switching and routing is critical in order to have any shot at a successful phone system experience.
After completing inventory of what is in the network, make sure the network gets documented. Documenting the network is good for several reasons. In addition to an inventory list, I would also strongly suggest creating technical diagrams, which are an excellent way to get a visual representation of your IT network. They can also provide non-technical decision makers with context on how the business is operating. I know for me personally, pictures really help tell a story. In addition to illustrating the IT network, diagrams can also paint a picture of the phone system and how it is used. Here at Speakeasy, we create “call flows,” which are pictures that document and show you how your business communicates, from customers who call in to the receptionist to how an Automated Attendant will route calls. They allow IT professionals and business owners to really think about how they want to communicate by pictures. These diagrams also eliminate any ambiguity that could occur when setting up the new system. There are many reasons why documenting the network is key – the ones I shared are just a few examples.
Tune in for my next blog entry, where we will focus on part 2: Network Considerations.
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Bruce Chatterley, CEO
Posted June 15th, 2010 in Broadband, Speakeasy, Voice (VoIP)
We recently announced some pretty exciting news: Speakeasy, Covad and MegaPath are combining to form a single business. The combined businesses will create the first managed services local exchange carrier (MSLEC) able to provide a full range of IP voice, security, VPN and Internet media services nationwide. This combined company will continue to be a leader in delivering communications solutions to small businesses, enterprises and wholesale markets.
We have an exciting vision for how our new company can better serve customers in the future. With a nationwide data network , state of the art VoIP technology, and a broad set of managed security services, we are in a strong position to help our customers succeed in their businesses. In combination with these new services, we also remain committed to continue striving to deliver the best customer support experience in the industry.
We are excited about this news and the opportunities it presents. The deal is expected to close sometime during the third quarter; in the meantime, we will communicate information about our plans to our valued customers and partners along the way, as information becomes available. For more information, please see our press release. As always, thank you for your support and I look forward to unveiling the full vision of our new company in the coming months.
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Nicola Onychuk, Senior Engineering Project Manager
Posted May 26th, 2010 in Broadband, Speakeasy, Voice (VoIP)
It’s probably safe to say that all service providers strive to make their customer service experience the best it can possibly be, but at Speakeasy, we work at this goal every day, in every department.
One of the tools that our customer service team uses toward that goal is a proprietary information management system that helps us remember every interaction you’ve had with us since you first became a customer. Tickets, requests, changes – they’re all in there, from the very beginning.
As you can imagine, that ends up creating a lot of data. Recently, our Engineering and Development teams undertook the Herculean task of replacing and upgrading all the hardware that our databases reside on.
After several months of planning and testing, we put up a few guardrails, closed access to the systems that write to the database, took a deep breath, and pulled the switch.
If you imagine how railroad tracks are switched, that is sort of what we did – but instead of physically moving from one set of rails to another, we redirected the traffic coming into the old database servers to the new ones.
Immediately, we kicked off a tightly orchestrated test plan with our senior network, systems, database, software, and test engineers all on hand and watching as each test completed successfully. Though we had some tense moments when a few tests took longer than we had expected, in the end we were back online and fully available exactly on schedule, without a single bug.
The new hardware has enabled Speakeasy to keep up-to-the minute current on important vendor software updates and patches, and gives us even more flexibility in our ability to have the information at our fingertips that you and your support rep most need at that moment.
Photo – licensed for re-use http://www.flickr.com/photos/elsie/8229790/
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