Asterisk :: Voicepulse Customer Support

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Inbound sound quality issues

I did manage to finally diagnose the annoying problems I've been having intermittently on inbound calls coming from my connect.voicepulse.com account. I'd always sort of assumed that it was just jitterbuffer settings that I needed to tweak. I've had no luck at all finding comprehensive or coherent documentation on how to tune the jitterbuffer, so my assumption has always been that the problem was fundamentally my own ignorance.

A few weeks ago I finally got totally fed up and decided to fix the problem once and for all. I spent the whole morning trying every imaginable combination of jitterbuffer settings combined with enabling, disabling, and even physically removing my firewall/traffic shaping box from the network. I was never able to get good quality inbound audio. I was beginning to fear that some low level aspect of my DSL was just fundamentally prohibiting VoIP call quality.

I knew that my work voicepulse account never had these problems, but that it runs on a colocated box with gobs and gobs of bandwidth. On a hunch, I swapped the accounts between my home and work servers for a few minutes. To my amazement, the crappy call quality followed my home account. Clearly the problem is not on my end! The problems followed the account to a different machine and my work DID sounded great on my home server.

In bitching about the problem in #asterisk, a VoicePulse rep noticed and I chatted on IRC with him for a bit about the problem. He confirmed that they use a different company to supply their area code 512 DIDs (my home number) and their area code 510 DIDs (my work number). He promised to open a ticket to investigate.

It's been a few weeks and the problem persists, but perhaps they'll find and resolve the problem. For now, my 512 DID is pretty much unusable, and has always been really bad quality.

Account Compromise

This morning I noticed that I'd been auto-billed for another $10 to recharge my home account, just a few days after the last recharge. Since I probably only make five or six outbound calls a day, at most, this was a totally unreasonable amount of time between recharges. I logged in to the VoicePulse website and checked out the call detail log for my account. It was full of hundreds of calls I never made. I called one of the numbers and it was a Western Union quick collect number. Quite suspicious. It was pretty clear that my IAX2 credentials had been compromised.

It's not impossible that this was my fault. I've only just recently cleaned up my iax.conf and extensions.conf to stop using the lame IAX2/user:password@host style of dialing targets. Up until this point all my logs and for a while my extensions.conf as well have been exposing my account credentials. It's not impossible that I screwed up and accidently published the information or pasted it in a log or config snippet. Still -- the damage has been done and people were spending my money.

There's no way via the voicepulse website to change the IAX2 credentials. They're static and tied to the account. I called voicepulse support to ask for help (which wasn't easy, they hide their phone number). They were completely unprepared to deal with this situation, which surprised me. It turns out that the only way to solve the problem was for me create a brand new account on the website. I tried, but the website curiously rejected every one of the credit cards I tried as invalid (even the one I'd been using for the other account). I had to call back and talk the voicepulse rep through creating the account for me. He seemed completely disinterested in the fact that the website was broken.

Once the new account was created I was told that it would take four hours or so for my DID to be transferred to the new account. This apparently requires "the database guys" to manually move the record. Four hours seemed unreasonable for the relative simplicity of the process, but hey, I was in no position to argue.

I reconfigured my asterisk to use the new IAX2 credentials, and did some account management. I tried to clear out the credit card details from the dead account (not possible -- the web site pukes on empty data with scary sql errors), so then I tried to put in bogus card information (not accepted), and then finally put in a credit card I had in high school which hasn't worked since 1991.

Next I logged in to the new account and discovered that when I'd said I lived in "Austin" he heard "Boston" and my city/state were incorrect. I changed them, but the website doesn't actually let you change the state. So now VoicePulse thinks that I live in "Austin, MA" and for sure this will prevent me from recharging the account when I need to put more money in.

They were also a bit amazed that I'd care about the $6 credit in the old account. It took some explaining before I was able to communicate that I expected that credit to be transferred to the new account.

It's been three hours and I'm just waiting for the DID to come across. I miss it, although since the audio quality still sucks I guess I shouldn't be too upset over the downtime.

So?

All in all, it's fair to say that I'm quite disappointed in VoicePulse's service, both technical and support. The website exhibits some really unprofessional and amateur bugs and the people I've talked to for phone support have been disengaged and unconcerned about my and their problems.

There's room for a competitor to displace voicepulse with little effort.

Next: E164 -- It's just plain good karma