Dear iptel,

Thankyou for your open source website and excellent information. I hope you are able to help me with the following.

We are an Australian organisation. We are trying to find a good quality SIP provider, commercial grade, with high connectivity success rates. We have used Skype, and it works incredibly well. It gets through your firewall and succeeds with login and successful voice and video call connection just about every time. But every public or commercial SIP Service I have used has failed to perform as well. Both the open source and the commercial SIP servers all suffer from the same problems:

they don't login unless you open up port 5060 on your firewall, regardless of whether STUN or TURN or ICE is in use
they don't reliably connect each call, sometimes the calling end just keeps ringing, and the receiving end doesn't ring
even if a call gets connected, they often have one of the 4 A/V streams missing, eg. we get video and outgoing audio, but no incoming audio
when one party hangs up, sometimes the other end sometimes doesn't know about it and just sits there thinking the call is still underway
when the Internet is busy, eg. at 4pm when children get home from school and jump on the Internet, their media relays struggle to keep up and UDP streams are badly degraded

Note that we have not yet tried iptel.org, but I note that video is not talked about much on your website, and also you are an open source organisation, who cannot be expected to provide a commercial grade service. (If I am wrong about this, please tell me and I will certainly give iptel.org a try!)

Using Jitsi, Linphone, and many other softphones, we have tried ....

ippi.fr
jumblo.com
pennytel.com
opensips.org
sip.linphone.org
an Australian commercial VoIP service by MyNetFone (works very well, but voice only)

We are a business, and we are prepared to pay for a SIP Service. We cannot use ooVoo, Tango, Goober, ippi Messenger and other closed applications. We have to use an open source softphone such as Jitsi or Linphone, because they have an API. So my questions are ....

Are you aware of any commercial grade SIP providers that work as well as Skype:

they have STUN / TURN / ICE support in place

they support both video and audio calls

regardless of where I am located (at home, at work, on my smartphone, using WiFi at a hotel, etc.)

regardless of what firewall I am behind

call connection occurs reliably, regardless of where I am located and regardless of firewall

every call always connects
if codecs at each end match, the call successfully connects audio and video streams both ways
when one party hangs up, the other end knows about it and doesn't just sit there thinking the call is still underway

their servers and infrastructure performs well even at peak periods, for example at 4pm when all the children get home from school and jump on the Internet
they have high performance media relays in place, so that audio and/or video can be relayed if required

If no company or organisation offers a SIP Service that performs as well as Skype, can you recommend any company or individual that we can engage (pay) to establish our own SIP Service. They must have the skills to setup SIP Server, STUN Server, TURN Server, and to adjust ports and settings so that anybody can login and make a call from anywhere, behind any firewall.

Your recommendations would be very much appreciated.

Thankyou,

Karl Grimm.

Karl Grimm, Managing Director
Mobile: 0418 310 989 | karl@konnekt.net.au

Konnekt

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