XO FLEX PRI

XO FLEX PRI

A Few Experiences that i would like to share.

1) The Flex PRI is not a true pri its an IP/PRI. This has some limits on what your t1 can do, such as being able to set you out going caller id and some advantages that a normal T1 can not do, split your t1 channels dynamically into bandwidth or voice channels depending on what you need.

2) Out of the 3 months that the t1 has been active, i have only been able to use it for about 1/2 that time. Now this is not entirely XO's fault. Its just that they had no experience in making it work with asterisk. I think that by the time you read this, their customer service may have improved. This was due to XO blocking my calls. They changed a setting on the pri to not allow any calls to go out unless i had my caller id set as one of the numbers they assigned to me. After calling XO about a dozen times, having them send a tech out to my location (who said it was working fine) and then opening a service contract with DIGIUM to make sure that my settings were correct. No one could figure out why this was not working. In fact all the XO techs i spoke with couln't see anything wrong with their equipment. By chance one day i figured out that If i set my caller ID to be that of one assigned to me, the call WOULD work. It only took me 3 aggravating weeks of troubleshooting and hair pulling to figure out that little gem.

3) They forced me to bring my tech skills to the next level. For that I'm grateful. Now I can walk into any asterisk / t1 situation and confidently diagnose the fix the problem in short order.

I finally stumbled across the neato command:

pri intense debug span 4
Span 4 is the 4th port on my 4 port asterisk card. If you had a single port you would use span 1 for example.
To turn of debugging mode just type pri no debug span 4

Carefull review of the output of a failed call showed me the reason why it was not working.

< Informational frame:
< SAPI: 00 C/R: 1 EA: 0
< TEI: 000 EA: 1
< N(S): 043 0: 0
< N(R): 027 P: 0
< 9 bytes of data
-- ACKing all packets from 26 to (but not including) 27
-- Since there was nothing left, stopping T200 counter
-- Stopping T203 counter since we got an ACK
-- Nothing left, starting T203 counter
< Protocol Discriminator: Q.931 (8) len=9
< Call Ref: len= 2 (reference 24/0x18) (Terminator)
< Message type: DISCONNECT (69)
< [08 02 82 81]
< Cause (len= 4) [ Ext: 1 Coding: CCITT (ITU) standard (0) 0: 0 Location: Public network serving the local user (2)
< Ext: 1 Cause: Unallocated (unassigned) number (1), class = Normal Event (0) ]
Sending Receiver Ready (44)


BASICALLY, it says, "YO I'm going to disconnect your call because i don't like your CALLER ID"

I THEN promptly called XO (after being down 3 weeks) which was in the middle of the night (to be fair) to inform them of how they could quickly get me back up and running(stop blocking my caller id). Upon my call, the tech incorrectly informed me that my problem was not a level 1 outage and would have to be worked on the next day. After some haggling I gave up and decided that they probably just didn't have anyone working at night that could actually fix my problem. I decided to write a little hack and just set my outgoing caller ID to be that of my main BTN. By this time, I had already switched my outgoing calls over to a different carrier and were only using them to route 800 numbers.

In All Fairness, the product would work great and the pricing was great too(0.01 / minute nation wide) if it wasn't for the fact they don't let you assign your own callerID. I begged them for months to get my CALLERID problem solved...If they could just get those little quirks worked out. If in the future they do get the quirks resolved, I would be more then happy to become a customer again.