Wednesday, October 28, 2009

System Update - 5 min. service outage expected

We plan a system wide update this evening at around 8pm GMT. The planned update which is to fix a memory leak in our system backup proceedures will require a reboot of the sip1 cluster.

The service outage is not expected to exceed 5 mins. We thank all users for their understanding and appologise if any inconvienience or dropped calls are experienced.

Notes on Voice Fraud

An example of Voice Phishing fraud was exposed today involving a mydivert.com user.

Voice Phishing, also known as Vishing is the criminal use of telephone communications, most often using features facilitated by Voice over IP (VoIP), to gain access to private personal and financial information. While scams such as Email Phishing have been around for some time, Voice Phishing exploits the public's trust in landline telephone services, which have traditionally terminated in physical locations which are known to the telephone company, and associated with a bill-payer.

It should be understood by anyone using mydivert.com that although the technology provides flexability, and fantastic communication opportunites, it should not be seen as an anonymous service. At any time, a law enforcement agency may contact us requesting the user information for a purchased phone number, and we are obliged to forward these details. This policy is intended to protect the interests of the general public, mydivert.com users, and the VoIP business model.

In a case such as that exposed today, a potential fraudster should understand that the complete call history, IP history, and all other user data is passed to law enforcement agencies.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

service disruption - German and Russian DID

Incoming calls on some German and Russian DID are being dropped by our servers after 30 seconds.

Our technicians are now working to find the cause and resolve this issue.

We appologise for any inconvienience being caused.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Cheaper Call Rates Introduced

We are pleased to introduce our new international call rates plan offering some of the best call termination routes at the lowest possible prices. Combined with our 30 second billing cycle this is another opportunity to make huge savings on international calls.

The full call rates plan can be found here: Low Cost International Calls

Configuration for Asterisk behind NAT

Following the rollout of our new sip cluster, and the introduction of Kamailio extension state management, we would like to publish the new Asterisk configuartion required to work with mydivert.com

This configuration example assumes that your Asterisk server is on a private IP address behind NAT. If your Asterisk is behind NAT it must be setup to work behind NAT, i.e it should send it's private IP address in the contact field. This way the mydivert.com server knows that the respective peer is behind NAT and it can send back the packet properly.

To configure Asterisk with mydivert.com please make the following replacements in the sip.conf example given below:

SIPUSERNAME = Your SIP account username
SIPPASSWORD = Your SIP account password
LOCAL-IP = Your asterisk LOCAL IP address (example: 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0)
PUBLIC-IP = Your PUBLIC IP address (example: 200.43.215.194)

The configuration for Asterisk (sip.conf) should look like this :

[general]
disallow = all
allow = g729
allow = ulaw
allow = alaw
extenip = PUBLIC-IP
localnet = LOCAL-IP
context = default
nat = yes
domain = PUBLIC-IP

register => SIPUSERNAME:SIPPASSWORD@sip1.mydivert.com/SIPUSERNAME

[sip1.mydivert.com]
fromuser = SIPUSERNAME
username = SIPUSERNAME
authuser = SIPUSERNAME
insecure = very
dtmfmode = rfc2833
dtmf = rfc2833
disallow = all
allow = g729
allow = ulaw
allow = alaw
type = peer
host = sip1.mydivert.com
qualify = yes
nat = yes
context = default
canreinvite = yes
secret = SIPPASSWORD

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

calls charged in 30 second intervals

In order to celebrate the roll-out of our new SIP cluster, and to thank all our customers for their understanding, we are pleased to announce the immediate introduction of a 30 second billing cycle on all outgoing calls.

All calls are now charged for the first 30 seconds and then every 30 second interval after that!

We are not aware of any other VoIP carrier offering 30 second intervals. The usual model is to charge for the first minute on connection, and then 60 second intervals after that. Our 30 second intervals offer the chance of great savings and fantastic value to our users.

More great news to follow in the coming days........

Monday, October 5, 2009

SIP Service for Nokia Mobile Devices

Everyone on the mydivert.com team has been working hard on the server migration programme over the weekend and to date it has been a fantastic success with zero errors reported. Over 30% of users have now been migrated.

One benifit of the new system that has immediatly come to light is the new Nokia compatible SIP usernames we are using. Until now Nokia devices using non English language settings have had issues with the * character that was included. The new usernames are only digits 0-9.

We have already seen around 15% of migrated accounts are now connecting with Nokia mobile devices and benifiting from cheap VoIP calls, and DID numbers, on their mobile phones.

Sunday, October 4, 2009

Server Migrations Begin

The long awaited migration to our new SIP cluster began successfuly on Friday night, 2nd October 2009. So far around 10% of users have been migrated to the new systems without any reported problems.

The new systems provide for better SIP connectivity, provisioning, and audio quality besides allowing for the development of user features.

The new 64 bit cluster is built around Intel Core i7-920 Quad Core processors running Asterisk 1.6.