Maintel SIP Trunking Service Description November 2016 Brian Mackow-McGuire 2016 Maintel maintel.co.uk Maintel SIP Trunking Service Description_1216 1
Contents 1. SIP Service Overview 4 1.1. What is Maintel's SIP Trunking? 4 1.2. Benefits of SIP 4 2. SIP Features 6 2.1. Numbering 6 2.2. Number Porting 6 2.3. Number Presentation/Restriction 6 2.4. Number Flexibility 6 2.5. Call Divert 6 2.6. Call Barring 6 2.7. Facsimile & DTMF 7 2.8. Emergency Call Support 7 2.9. Codecs 7 2.10. Directory Entry 8 2.11. Resiliency Options 8 2.12. Spend Management 8 2.13. Interoperability with IPPBXs 9 3. Additional Services 10 3.1. IP Connectivity 10 3.2. Session Border Controller (SBC) 10 3.3. Monitoring & Availability Management 10 3.4. PBX, Gateways and SBC interfaces 10 4. Incompatible Services 11 2016 Maintel maintel.co.uk 2
5. Initial Migration / Implementation 12 5.2. Porting 12 6. Provisioning 14 7. Support Services 15 7.1. Restoration Targets 15 8. Service Availability 16 9. Charges and Billing 17 9.1. Online Billing 17 10. Customer Responsibilities 18 10.1. Initial Migration / Implementation 18 10.2. Provisioning 18 10.3. Support Services 18 2016 Maintel maintel.co.uk 3
1. SIP Service Overview Maintel provides a range of voice services for businesses, of which Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is one. This document describes Maintel's SIP Trunking: its benefits and features, how it is implemented, provisioned, supported and billed. 1.1. What is Maintel's SIP Trunking? Maintel's SIP Trunking provides a next generation method of allowing inbound and outbound telephony for termination to a full range of national and international destinations and is a highly flexible alternative to traditional ISDN voice connectivity solutions. SIP is the protocol that controls calls, setting up each call and closing it down. SIP Trunks enable a customer to connect their PBX to our network via an IP connection to carry and terminate their inbound and outbound calls across the PSTN network. Our SIP Trunking solutions allow organisations to lower costs, increase resilience with a disaster recover strategy and improve flexibility by using new or existing telephone numbers anywhere in the UK (receive calls from a London number to your office in Manchester with no divert costs). More and more organisations are turning to SIP technology as an alternative to ISDN30, driven by the need for cost effective, flexible voice solutions and to support the complex requirements of unified communications. Maintel provides SIP Trunking solutions as a Managed Service covering the IP connectivity, SIP Trunks, number management and Sessions Border Controllers (SBCs). Please note This Service Description relates to the Maintel SIP Trunk Service and excludes details on IP connectivity, Session Border Controllers (SBCs), Monitoring and Availability Management, PBX Gateways and SBC interfaces and Customer Premises Equipment (CPE). 1.2. Benefits of SIP 1.2.1. Business Continuity Our SIP Trunks solutions are generally deployed in resilient disaster recovery ready designs. Maintel's resilient SIP solutions can be designed to provide complete geographic, carrier and hardware resilience removing any single points of failure. A resilient network will allow the customer to make or receive calls to alternative locations automatically if the primary route goes down for any reason. 1.2.2. Scalability Our SIP Trunks are perfect for customers who are moving, upsizing or downsizing and want to keep their existing numbers. Our SIP Trunks give customers the capability to scale up lines during busy seasonal periods and back down again afterwards. 2016 Maintel maintel.co.uk 4
1.2.3. Spend Management Our SIP Trunking service can provide a call spend monitoring service that tracts spend on a daily and weekly basis. The call spend is tracked and compared against the daily and weekly limits that are set on the account to limit a customer's exposure to internal and external fraud. 1.2.4. Line rationalisation For organisations with multiple sites, SIP trunking provides an easy way to centralise their telephony and rationalise lines. Centralising telephony will allow customers to reduce the number of PBX's they need to manage and maintain as well as allowing them to reduce the total number of lines they rent. Customers will be able to retain all existing numbers as they will be ported out of the local exchange into the cloud. 1.2.5. Number Flexibility Number flexibility can present a preferred number on customers' outbound SIP trunk calls. Number flexibility with our SIP Trunks means that a customer can keep their existing number, even when moving out of the area. We can easily transfer a customers' old or existing numbers too so that they can avoid expensive Remote Call Forwarding (RCF) or call diversion charges. 1.2.6. Resilience A resilient SIP Trunking design provides a telephony service that will guard against downtime that may result from hardware or network failures. Whether you need to keep your business running in a disaster or emergency by running a secondary standby site that kicks in if any hardware or the network fails at your primary site, or if you need to load share calls across a number of telephone systems. 1.2.7. Save Money IP connectivity costs less than ISDN with lower call costs, free internal calls between extensions and offices and lower line rental costs for multi-sites. Also, no expensive call-forwarding costs are required should you relocate or need to divert calls in the event of a disaster. 2016 Maintel maintel.co.uk 5
2. SIP Features Our SIP Trunking service includes the following features: 2.1. Numbering Where new geographic/non-geographic numbers are required for termination of inbound services, these numbers can be provided by us. 2.2. Number Porting Existing geographic/non geographic numbers may be ported to us and provisioned on the SIP service providing that a live porting agreement is in place between our SIP partner and the Originating and Losing Communications Provider of the number(s). 2.3. Number Presentation/Restriction Network provided features Calling Line Identification Presentation (CLIP) and Calling Line Identification Restriction (CLIR) are services that transmit or restrict a caller's number to the called party's telephone equipment during the ringing signal. Both services are compatible with our SIP service. 2.4. Number Flexibility As an optional service, customers have the ability to present, non-registered CLIs, as the presentation number CLI. 2.5. Call Divert This feature provides the facility to pre-configure call diverts for both individual numbers and DDI number ranges under failure conditions. 2.6. Call Barring To help protect against call fraud customers are able to modify their profiles to restrict or allow access to international, mobile or premium rate numbers. When SIP Trunk services are ordered call barring requirements will be set. Call barring can be changed on a SIP Trunk at any time during the term of contract. 2016 Maintel maintel.co.uk 6
2.7. Facsimile & DTMF A facsimile service is supported using G.711 Pass-through. DTMF refers to Dual-Tone Multi Frequency and is generated by touch tone phones to create signal tones when the buttons are pressed. SIP clients such as softphones generate SIP signalling which the network converts to DTMF where required. The following methods for signalling DTMF are available: In-band and RFC2833. 2.8. Emergency Call Support Our SIP Trunking service is a VoIP service as defined by Ofcom and supports Emergency Services calls. Once the service is fully operational, 999/112 public emergency call services will be called by customers and these calls will be routed to the national emergency call handling agents. The customer is responsible for providing us with accurate address details to provide to the administrators of the UK Emergency Services Database (ESDB). Note the following: Single address per SIP end point as standard All DDI blocks applied to the same SIP Trunk have the same address registered with the ESDB Only a single address can be entered into the ESDB. Such address should be their primary business location. If they require this to be changed owing to relocation (or a change in the location from which outbound calls are made e.g. failover) they should contact us to make the change via email: maintelprovisioning@maintel.co.uk If they intend to use this service in multiple locations or use Out of Area numbers, then they are responsible for ensuring that they are aware that there is a single address registered with the ESDB. In the event of making a call to the Emergency Services, callers should provide the Emergency Services operator with details of the location that their call is about. The address provided must exist in the Royal Mail s Postcode Address File (PAF). It is your responsibility to ensure their address exists in the PAF otherwise the order will not proceed. If the End User s PBX is presenting a number on outbound calls which we have not allocated to you or cannot be ported into our network, the Rangeholder is still responsible for maintaining the ESDB entry for that number. You are therefore responsible for keeping the Rangeholder informed of any change to the installation site where that number is used, for example, where the End User has moved site and is presenting the number on outbound calls from a site which differs from that where the number was used before the site move. 2.9. Codecs A codec converts an analogue voice signal into digital data for routing across an IP network. The following codec is supported as standard: G.711 A-law. Other codecs may be able to be supported upon request. 2016 Maintel maintel.co.uk 7
2.10. Directory Entry New Directory entries can be ordered or we can take over existing entries for imported numbers. It should be noted that the features listed are not guaranteed to be supported on every CPE platform connected to the SIP Trunk Service because of vendor interoperability issues. A list of approved vendors is available upon request. 2.11. Resiliency Options Maintel offers three SIP trunk network design options as standard: 2.11.1. Single Endpoint - Active No resilience available with this design. 2.11.2. Dual Endpoints - Secondary Failover or Active/Standby This design offers dual endpoints working in Secondary Failover mode. If the primary endpoint (i.e. IP address) becomes unavailable, calls are automatically routed the secondary endpoint (i.e. different IP address). The primary and secondary SIP endpoints are configured with total channel allocation i.e. 100 channels on primary and 100 channels on secondary. Each channel allocation is shared between incoming and outgoing calls. Calls will be automatically routed to the secondary endpoint, if the primary endpoint fails. 2.11.3. Dual Endpoints - Simultaneous This design offers dual endpoints working in simultaneous mode. For this configuration, inbound calls are delivered simultaneously to both the primary and secondary endpoints (i.e. different IP addresses), then connected to whichever destination responds first. Each channel allocation is shared between incoming and outgoing calls. Calls will be automatically routed to the alternate endpoint (i.e. different IP address), if one endpoint fails. To ensure our SIP Trunking solutions are built to meet customer requirements our pre-sales teams are engaged providing solution design & infrastructure planning when transitioning to SIP based services. 2.12. Spend Management Our Spend Management Service can be applied to all numbers passing calls to protect the customer against unusual call usage and charges. The Spend Management function is an option that allows customers to set pre-arranged spend limits on individual SIP Endpoints. It is important to ensure that spend limits are set realistically based on the customers actual spend. 2016 Maintel maintel.co.uk 8
On reaching a set percentage of the predetermined spend limit an SMS will be sent to a nominated customer contact notifying them the predetermined spend limit has hit the set percentage. If spend then reaches 100% of the predetermined spend limit, calls from that end point with be barred. Calls to the emergency services 999, 112 & 18000 will be unaffected Inbound Calls are not affected Calls set-up via the emergency Divert function are excluded in the spend management calculation When SIP Trunk services are ordered Spend Management limits can be set. Spend Management alerts can be changed on SIP Endpoints at any time during the term of contract. Once the Spend Management limit is agreed and set, if the customer is aware of any fluctuations in usage due to sales and marketing campaigns or seasonal adjustments it is the responsibility of the customer to advise the Maintel provisioning team via email, providing 48 hours' notice in order for the Spend Management limit to be adjusted. Failing to adjusting the Spend Management threshold during these periods will result in network level call barring if the thresholds are reached. Spend limits can be monitored both 24 hour and 7 day periods. 2.13. Interoperability with IPPBXs Our SIP Trunks can be used with a range of IP-PBXs. We will provide a list of IP-PBXs that interoperate with our SIP Trunks, on request. The Customer may request that Maintel tests and approves an IP PBX(s) that does not appear in the current list. 2016 Maintel maintel.co.uk 9
3. Additional Services A number of additional services are available these are optional, chargeable extras. 3.1. IP Connectivity We provide the IP Connectivity required to deliver SIP services including: Ethernet, FTTC, EFM, DSL and SMPF/MPF through our network partners. Our pre-sales teams will work with the customer to design a solution to meet channel and bandwidth requirements. 3.2. Session Border Controller (SBC) We recommend that an SBC is located on the customer premises allowing only authorised sessions to pass through the connection point (border). The SBC defines and monitors the Quality of Service (QoS) status for all sessions, ensuring that the callers will actually communicate with each other and that emergency calls are delivered correctly and prioritised above all other calls. Our pre-sales teams will work with the customer to design the SIP solution and advise on whether an SBC is required. 3.3. Monitoring & Availability Management We provide SIP 24x7 health and availability monitoring with alarms and alerts automatically generating fault tickets into our incident management system, rapidly triggering the appropriate engineering response based on impact and severity. 3.4. PBX, Gateways and SBC interfaces A wide range of PBX s, gateways and SBC s are compatible with our SIP Trunking service. When you order a new SIP Trunk we ask you to specify the make and model of your PBX. 2016 Maintel maintel.co.uk 10
4. Incompatible Services There are a number of services that cannot be used with our SIP Trunking. The following list confirms the current incompatible services. Carrier Pre-Selection / Indirect Digital Access BT Redcare 1470 & 1471 Connected Line Presentation/Restriction (COLP/R) 2016 Maintel maintel.co.uk 11
5. Initial Migration / Implementation Our methodology is based on PMI s PMBoK and APM s PRAM Guide to Project Risk Management and is PRINCE2 compliant. Our projects process and its application are covered under Maintel s ISO 9001:2008 accreditation and focussed on continual improvement. With our nationwide team, we will deliver any number of concurrent projects. 5.1.1. Approach The management of the transition process is critical to the success of transferring the customer s incumbent Traditional Telephony Services to us. Upon contract award the customer will be appointed a Project Co-ordinator within our Transition Management Team. 5.2. Porting We hold direct porting agreements with all the major networks and have access to BT IP Exchange for smaller networks that don t have direct porting agreements. For those networks where porting agreements are in place the process is split into five stages: 5.2.1. Pre-Port Preparation Numbers are checked for portability to ensure the correct porting process is used. We will also need to ensure the correct porting service is used e.g. single line, multi-line with more than 11 DDI. At this stage we will also require a letter of authority to be signed giving us permission to port your numbers. 2016 Maintel maintel.co.uk 12
5.2.2. Order Port order is raised through appropriate process 5.2.3. Monitor During the monitoring stage orders will either be accepted or rejected, if an order is rejected a feedback code will be presented that will tell us why the order was rejected. This may happen because the data supplied was inconsistent to the data that the current number provider holds on their system. If this occurs the information will need to be validated and the order resubmitted. 5.2.4. Nearly There Pre-port test call that ensures the number is setup on the correct product. This allows us to identify any issues because the number goes live. The call also allows us to ensure sound quality is where it should be. If any issues are raised at the point it is possible to reschedule the port. 5.2.5. Fulfilment The number port has been completed and the number is now live on the new service. We will be communicating with the existing range holder throughout the port to ensure there is no loss of service. 2016 Maintel maintel.co.uk 13
6. Provisioning Following the initial migration / implementation, the customer may, during working hours, request moves, adds, changes or deletions from the services provided. Requests can be made by emailing Maintelprovisioning@azzu.co.uk. We will endeavour to provide regular updates to the customer either by telephone or email to ensure full visibility of the order process. Upon completion the order will be closed and the customer updated accordingly. 6.1.1. Service Levels We aim to meet the following key Service Level Agreement targets All Inbound telephony calls answered within 30 seconds All Provisioning Orders (Provide, Change, Cease) acknowledged within 8 working hours of receipt All Provisioning Requests (Provide, Change, Cease) to be placed within 2 working days of receipt All Billing Queries to be acknowledged within 8 working hours of receipt 2016 Maintel maintel.co.uk 14
7. Support Services Our Support Services provides the key incident, problem, escalation, and vendor management capabilities, founded on ITIL principles and ISO standards, which are continuously reviewed and enhanced to meet new and challenging business and technology requirements. These services are backed by established technical response and resolution Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and are accessible via a single point of contact. Our Service Desk handles all reported issues via phone, email or dedicated web portal, 24x7x365. Our Technical Support team provide remote support for all solutions and are responsible for solution monitoring and management; incident and problem management; escalation and vendor management. We operate both technical and management escalation processes to ensure prompt resolution of issues and regular incident status reports. Customers will be provided with a dedicated web portal for reporting and monitoring incidents and change requests. The Field Engineering team provide on-site support and maintenance activities, where required. 7.1. Restoration Targets Each incident type has an associated severity and Service Level Agreement (SLA) as indicated below. Incident severity Description SLA P1 Total outage/critical Fault - 6 clock hours Total loss of service P2 High service impact. 24 clock hours P3 Low service impact 7 days These are standard restoration target times based on our generic SIP trunk service. If you customer should require alternative service levels please contact pre-sales or product management for further information. 2016 Maintel maintel.co.uk 15
8. Service Availability Our SIP Trunking service provides an enhanced Service Level Agreement with additional resiliency options. The service availability for standard and resilient options is as follows: SIP Trunk Endpoint Single endpoint (Active) Dual endpoints (Active Standby / Load share / Load balanced) Availability 99.95% 99.99% This excludes scheduled and emergency maintenance. 2016 Maintel maintel.co.uk 16
9. Charges and Billing Charges are based on the agreed customer tariff. Calls are charged on a per-second basis according to the tariff for each specific destination and billed monthly in arrears. Lines are charged on a per item basis, according to product monthly in advance. One-off charges and connection charges are billed monthly in arrears. 9.1. Online Billing Our online billing software enables the customer to view, download and analyse their billing information as well as update their account settings. Our online billing provides: 9.1.1. 24/7 account access Customers can view their charges and itemisations both for the current period and historically over a period of 15 months. 9.1.2. Secure system with username and password Customers can be assured that their account information is hosted in a secure environment, only accessible by them. 9.1.3. Downloads and reports available Customers can effectively manage their accounts; with the ability to download bills, run reports and analyse their call data. 2016 Maintel maintel.co.uk 17
10. Customer Responsibilities 10.1. Initial Migration / Implementation The customer must take responsibility for any existing contractual agreements with suppliers, including volume related discount schemes The customer must have a IP enabled PABX which is SIP ready or Maintel approved gateway Customer must have all necessary SIP Trunking licences Customer provides DDI pre-fix number(s) required and quantity of DDIs in a timely fashion Customer provides confirmation that existing numbers will be ceased or re-directed to the new DDIs Customer accepts that the new numbers will be allocated by Maintel 10.2. Provisioning The customer is responsible for authorising any requests for moves, adds, changes and deletions from the SIP services. If Maintel are advised in writing of the names of sole authorised representatives, then requests will be restricted accordingly; otherwise the customer should make sure that all requests made to Maintel are suitably approved. 10.3. Support Services The customer should make sure that any incidents are reported promptly and accurately, and that appropriate checks are made on other aspects of their telephony network/system prior to reporting an incident to Maintel, where these aspects are not being managed by Maintel themselves. 2016 Maintel maintel.co.uk 18