Microsoft Teams already dominates the collaboration and corporate messaging market, and now you can make and receive internal and external voice and video calls by adding Calling. With Over the Wire’s MS Teams Calling solution you can use Direct Routing and replace your legacy PBX phone system.

Over the Wire takes the complexity out of Direct Routing by managing the Session Border Controllers (SBCs) and connecting you to our NetSIP voice platform. We don’t take a ‘one size fits all’ approach either – we work with you to tailor a solution specific to your business requirements, while still being able to be deployed in hours across your organisation. Other great features include:

• Simple deployment into MS Teams Phone System
• High quality calls backed by robust infrastructure deployments
• No migration of Microsoft Office 365 licensing required
• Flexible plan options to suit your business
• Leverage the deep integration with the Office 365 product suite

There’s never been a better time to embrace the deep integration that MS Teams offers with Office 365. Work from anywhere while staying connected to your business, colleagues and customers – as well as taking advantage of the community of millions of MS Teams users worldwide.

Read more about Microsoft Teams Calling or speak with our team about getting your business connected today.

The post Microsoft Teams just got a whole lot better! appeared first on Over the Wire.

Today, 30th September 2019, marks the end for traditional telephony in Australia. After a few false-starts and delays, today Telstra is officially starting to decommission ISDN services.

Shutdown of the ISDN (integrated services digital network) means the full disconnection of these services. This doesn’t only impact the phone lines, it also includes any phone numbers that haven’t yet been transitioned to Business VoIP. That means that any businesses caught out will face a situation where they not only are disconnected from making outbound calls until they find a replacement solution, but will also lose their phone numbers and their inbound calls – an unparalleled risk to Australian businesses that could cause significant impacts to revenue and customer relations for those caught out.

What is ISDN?

The ISDN has been the fixed line telephony option for businesses for decades, offering offices multiple simultaneous calls over a single connection. With the rise of SIP and Business VoIP services, organisations have instead been able to gain access to their phone services over the top (OTT) of existing internet and network connections – gaining flexibility and redundancy, while also being able to lower costs.

As a pioneer of converged voice and data solutions in Australia, Over the Wire has been at the forefront of this trend for well over a decade, having seen the writing on the wall for ISDN for quite some time. With the rise of OTT voice services, sales of traditional on-premises phone systems have plummeted in favour of cloud hosted PBX phone systems. These offer centralisation of the system for all branches for seamless collaboration, high-availability for ultimate usability from anywhere, and ease of access to reports and dashboards to help provide additional insights previously out of reach for most businesses. 

The enormous benefits to functionality and pricing made the mass exodus from ISDN (even before the shutdown was announced) no surprise to those in the industry. Even still, many companies still haven’t made the change, which is putting their business at risk.

Protecting your business

Preparation is key to surviving the ISDN shutdown, with a guide available to help businesses navigate the challenge. First and foremost, it is important to understand your risk exposure. The ISDN Shutdown Survival Guide will help you start planning, with Over the Wire available to help design and implement the best transition for you to keep your business connected. Speak to our expert team today and make sure your business is prepared.

The post The king is dead, long live the king appeared first on Over the Wire.

With the shutdown of ISDN services to commence at the end of September 2019, the death of traditional telephony is just around the corner. The roll-out of NBN, while incomplete, has been the catalyst for Telstra to pull support for the legacy fixed-line technology, and the flood of change requests has well and truly commenced.

Number Porting

A major change for organisations shifting from ISDN phone services to business VoIP is the requirement to convert their existing phone numbers to be virtually hosted. This is achieved by porting these numbers to a new VoIP provider to ensure they aren’t lost when ISDN services are disconnected.

Delays in porting numbers are already noticeable and substantial, with average porting timeframes doubled in the past 6 months when transferring away from Telstra, and increased over 50% from Optus and other carriers. These delays are impacting all number porting, not just transitions from ISDN, and is only expected to get worse as fixed-line telephony shutdown becomes a reality.

Handling the delays:

• Planning ahead is paramount. With complex number porting often taking as long as three months to finalise, getting ports underway early is the best way to ensure you don’t miss any calls. Over the Wire customers get access to our powerful self-service Customer Portal and easy-to-use number porting tool, and of course our friendly staff are always happy to help simplify the process for you.
• While waiting for number ports to be completed, a redirection to temporary numbers can help to keep services flowing and give you the ability to take advantage of your new VoIP setup sooner. Ask our sales team if you qualify for free temporary numbers to help make your transition to Over the Wire even smoother than ever.

Fibre Service Provisioning

In addition to the delays in number porting, the extra demand for high speed fibre internet and private network services has also caused longer than usual provisioning timeframes for these services. Whether as a necessity due to copper-based connections no longer being serviceable, or businesses taking advantage of great new pricing for additional bandwidth options to support over-the-top voice services, the spike in requests has been noticeable. While typical lead times for fibre services is between 4 – 8 weeks, the current trend is generally between 8 – 14 weeks.

Handling the delays:

• Again, planning ahead is an important factor. If moving office or in the path of a disconnection be sure to have your request in early to stay connected.
• If you’re in a pinch for time, we’ve got your back. Our Private Mobile Data options are a great way to bridge the gap and have you up-and-running fast – just see what Credo Financial had to say when we helped them relocate with just 2 weeks notice!

Be ready for the ISDN shutdown

If you’d like to know more about the ISDN shutdown and how you can make sure your business is prepared, check out or ISDN Shutdown Survival Guide, an ebook designed specifically to help Australian businesses navigate the minefield being caused the Telstra’s ISDN shutdown. Or let us know if you’d like help from one of our sales consultants to guide you through the process.

The post Threat of ISDN shutdown already causing delays across the industry appeared first on Over the Wire.

Since the ramp-up of the NBN roll-out, disconnection has been looming over ISDN services – the main phone lines still used by the majority of Australian businesses. With the cease of sale having come into full effect in June 2018, it might come as a surprise to many businesses that they only have a short time left before the disconnection of services commences. Originally slated to commence in June 2019, Telstra have quietly extended this to 30 September 2019, but this only buys businesses an extra 3 months to transition off the technology.

What services are being killed off, and why?

ISDN is a digital network technology that carries voice and data services over the public switched telephone network. This method requires a physical connection per location, dedicated to telephony traffic. With the rise of Voice over IP solutions telephony traffic can move to more versatile data network connections, enabling versatility and redundancy not available through traditional telephony.

Spurred on by the continued roll-out of the NBN, Telstra ceased sale of ISDN2, ISDN2 Enhanced, ISDN10/20/30, DDS Fastway, Megalink and Frame Relay products from 30th June 2018, with a final disconnection date expected by 2022 which is when the products will no longer exist. The disconnection of ISDN timeline is as follows:

• 31st January 2018 – New ISDN services became unavailable for customers who did not already have ISDN in place.
• 30th June 2018 – Full cease sale on new or additional ISDN services came into effect for all customers. No new ISDN services are available.
• 30th September 2019 – Disconnection will commence for existing ISDN connections
• By 2022 – All ISDN connections will be disconnected and the full network will be decommissioned.

How to survive the ISDN Shutdown

Preparation is key to surviving the ISDN shutdown without having your phones cut off. We’ve compiled an ISDN Shutdown Survival Guide to help businesses stay ahead.

This guide includes how to find out if your phone line is ISDN, an overview of the ISDN shutdown, what’s after ISDN, and how to deploy an IP telephony solution for your business.

To find out more, download the Survival Guide or reach out to a member of the Over the Wire team today.

The post The Death of Traditional Telephony Is Just Around The Corner appeared first on Over the Wire.

“We are pleased to announce the successful interoperability testing between NetSIP and 3CX. NetSIP is an experienced, VoIP provider who can offer 3CX Partners and customers superior quality and service. The combination of NetSIP and 3CX offers a reliable IP telephony solution to a broad range of Australian customers.” Yilmaz Kabaran, 3CX Account Manager Australia and New Zealand

This testing, conducted by 3CX staff in collaboration with Over the Wire voice engineers, has confirmed the interoperability of the platforms, and will enable Over the Wire customers using 3CX to auto-provision SIP registration now that Over the Wire’s NetSIP is included in the preferred providers list.

Additionally, as new releases of 3CX are developed the team at 3CX will confirm the continued accessibility of the platforms and have direct access to Over the Wire’s engineers should modifications be required.

Over the Wire was happy to have been able to work with 3CX to achieve this outcome, and look forward to providing additional benefit to 3CX and Over the Wire customers alike.

NetSIP, the voice platform by Over the Wire, continues to serve as a major telecommunications carrier in Australia and New Zealand. To learn more about our offerings, visit our IP Voice page.

The post 3CX adds OTW’s NetSIP as preferred SIP provider in Australia and New Zealand appeared first on Over the Wire.

Judo Bank is founded on the belief that the financing skills needed by the SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) community have been lost to increasingly centralised functions and cookie-cutter lending policies.

Judo’s mission is to put experienced and empowered relationship focused lenders back in customers premises, going against the industry trend by putting the customer experience first and foremost by ensuring Judo’s team can make credit decisions on the quality of the business, not just the quality of the security.

To do so, Judo looked to Over the Wire to deliver a network that enables its staff to work simply and securely from anywhere. By integrating Over the Wire’s Private Network, Voice and Network Security capabilities, both parties were able to collaborate on the design and implementation of the environment.

Alex Twigg, Judo Co-Founder says, “Starting with a blank sheet of paper is a fabulous opportunity but it’s not easy and wanting to flip an entrenched industry model on its head makes it more difficult again. We had to find likeminded technology partners that wanted to go on a journey with us, to make a difference. The OTW team got it from day 1 and the Network capabilities they delivered, just worked. We could focus all our efforts on creating a customer centric business, rather than how to enable our team to securely work from anywhere.”

With the strength and depth of OTW capabilities, Judo Bank is creating a secure, flexible and robust network infrastructure that is able to overcome substantial barriers to entry in a fraction of the time it has traditionally taken, and at minimal cost.

Judo’s eye is on the future, and the team have built a technology platform that removes the restriction of having to work within a specific location. With the network Judo can not only deliver flexible working but is ready to roll out to Australia through pop-up offices and roaming team members.

Michael Omeros, Managing Director at Over the Wire, says, “We’ve been delighted to work closely with Judo Bank and its founding team who have embraced a forward-thinking approach to their IT&T. We have been able to deliver a private data network, Hosted PBX voice services, data centre colocation, and advanced Managed Security offerings to Judo, but the real value has been how all of these elements integrate together.”

“For example, we have been able to provide Judo with virtual mobile numbers for their staff which still track calls through the phone system, but can be answered on our mobile softphone application. Not only does that give their staff the ability to make and receive calls anywhere, but it also gives them the ability to have a truly mobile workforce.”

“We’re excited for the next phase of their roll-out which will introduce pop-up offices and roaming staff securely connected to the private network with our Layer 2 Private Mobile 4G data service. This will give their mobile workforce secure access to their corporate network by entirely bypassing the public Internet.”

For further details please contact the Over the Wire team at info@overthewire.com.au or the Judo Bank team on their website.

Judo Bank is a registered trademarks of Judo Bank.

The post Over the Wire Collaborates with Judo Bank to Deliver Working from Anywhere appeared first on Over the Wire.

It might seem a long way off, but the eventual shut down of the Australian ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) will be here sooner than you think. By 2022 Telstra will discontinue supporting its ISDN products due to the supporting technologies and platforms nearing the end of their lifetime.

As the NBN continues to roll out across the country, what should businesses be doing in preparation for the switch?

What services will be switched off?

ISDN is a digital network technology that carries voice and data services over the public switched telephone network.

Telstra will cease the sale of ISDN2, ISDN2 Enhanced, ISDN10/20/30, DDS Fastway, Megalink and Frame Relay products by 30th June 2018, with a final disconnection date expected by 2022 which is when the products will no longer exist.

• 31st January 2018 – New ISDN service unavailable for customers who do not already have ISDN in place.
• 30th June 2018 – Full cease sale on new or additional ISDN services for all customers. No new services will be available.
• June 2019 30th September 2019 – Disconnection will commence for existing ISDN connections (commencement date pushed back in February 2019)
• By 2022 – All ISDN connections will be disconnected and full network will be decommissioned.

While businesses using these products can expect plenty of early warning leading up to the exit, the clock is definitely ticking for companies relying on ISDN to find an alternative solution.

Thankfully, a solution exists and it’s cheaper and more efficient than ISDN. SIP, or Session Initiated Protocol is the future of business voice.

How to make the move from ISDN to IP Voice

A SIP Trunk is the digital equivalent of a traditional phone line. A SIP Trunk needs to connect to a PBX – a device that provides the brains behind the phone system that enables multiple users to share lines. You will need to decide whether to host your PBX in the cloud or at your premises. Getting the assistance of a SIP provider will help simplify this process.

Here are some resources to help you get started

The ISDN Switch Off – 4 Things You Need To Do	The ISDN Shutdown Survival Guide
This quick read explains the four key things that your business should be doing to prepare for the ISDN switch off.	This in-depth guide explains everything you need to know about the ISDN shutdown and your replacement options.
Download	Download

With the imminent cessation of ISDN, switching to sophisticated SIP technology should be a business priority.

At Over the Wire, our solutions unite voice, data and security through a single, end-to-end service provider. We can help organisations of any size achieve a higher level of productivity.

To find out more, reach out to a member of the Over the Wire team today.

The post As ISDN begins its end, what will this mean for business voice? appeared first on Over the Wire.

How Do People make Money from Toll Fraud?

Like all technological scams, people commit toll fraud because it is a brilliantly irritating combination of anonymity, profitability, and scalability. While there are as many different variations in approach as there are companies to exploit, primarily the scams that we see getting run use one of the following methods.

Phone Cards

In the first instance the person will sell phone cards with heavily discounted international call rates. When a consumer uses the card, their call is connected to the international destination via an unsuspecting company’s PBX. Eventually the company will be hit with a massive bill for outgoing calls, rectify the security flaw, and the scammer will simply move on to the next unsuspecting victim. Because the scammer has passed off his primary cost structure, any money gained from the sale of the cards is money in the bank.

Premium Rate Numbers

The second scam is conceptually much simpler because requires neither phone cards nor an unsuspecting third party. Once the scammer has control of a company’s PBX they places a series of calls to premium rate numbers that he/she owns (the kind people would ordinarily call to talk to a very special person for $12.99 a minute). But unlike your typical premium rate number, there is no special person at the other end, just a voice recording inanely muttering in order to maintain the verisimilitude of a conversation. This is done to minimise the chances that the call is flagged as fraudulent and dropped. Meanwhile the charges pile up, and the scammer pockets the proceeds.

How do scammers get access to a PBX?

There are many different types of toll fraud and we won’t be going into all of them today. Instead we are going to focus on the one we see as being the most pertinent to Australian businesses: PBX hacking. Typically a scammer will write a script that crawls the internet looking for vulnerabilities in companys’ firewalls (like open ports). Once an opening is detected, the scammer can then punch requests at it in order to tease out information about what the system is and how it might be vulnerable. Eventually they will have all the information they need to brute force their way through the firewall. For anonymity purposes and to reduce their own infrastructure costs, experienced scammers will do this via either a proxy, or a botnet (sometimes called a zombie network) of previously hacked computers.

Once the firewall has been breached the scammer can gain access to the PBX, build a back door into the system, and use it to route as much traffic through it as they think they can get away with.

What do Telco’s do to protect against it

From the Telco’s perspective (assuming it has been done elegantly) toll fraud is very difficult to detect. This is due to the fact that the traffic appears to be authentically originating from the company’s PBX with the source IP, user account, user ID, and password all matching the company’s records.

This means that some of the best tools in a telecommunications provider’s arsenal are the ability to monitor for the presence of toll fraud by scanning for atypical call activity, and the imposition of limitations to minimise the damage that can be done. For security reasons we will refrain from going into specifics, but the following list represents some typical strategies that providers employ:

Imposing channel limitations

Along with bandwidth limitations, toll fraud is one of the primary reasons that providers limit the number of concurrent calls that can be made from a single PBX. While this tactic may not actively discourage fraudsters, it limits the amount of damage that can be done over a short space of time. Because providers can see the number of calls that are attempting to connect (not just the ones that get put through) they are able to use this as an indicator of abnormal traffic activity. Additionally, because the vast majority of call fraud occurs to international numbers (see the picture below), providers will often impose separate limitations on how many concurrent international calls a customer can make.

Imposing a threshold on the maximum per minute cost of a phone call

Providers often impose an upper limit on the per-minute costs of calls that they are happy to connect, unless clients have specifically request that this limitation be removed. This limitation is used to prevent scammers from being able to dial premium rate numbers, such as 1900 numbers.

Limiting the amount of credit that a company is extended

In a worst case scenario, telecommunications providers seek to protect their customers from exorbitant call costs by placing an upper threshold on the amount of billable calls that a company is able to incur. The rules around this differ from provider to provider, and are likely to be dependent on the size of a company’s average bill, so it is worth checking with your provider what your limit is and negotiating an increase or decrease as you see fit.

What can you do to protect against PBX Hacking?

Use complex and varied passwords

Time and time again we find toll fraud comes back to weak passwords. So even though it seems obvious, we are going to say it anyway: “Don’t use common passwords like 1234, password, guest, 1000, test, or the same four digit code as the extension phone”. If you have trouble remembering your passwords, either use some secure software like Keepass to generate and keep track of them, or use a combinations that are easy to remember like “14CharlieSheen?” or “3BlindMice!”.

Check your ISDN failover configuration

If you are using SIP based telephony, but have also chosen to maintain or setup a failover to an ISDN line, make sure your ISDN lines can’t be used to call high toll numbers. Why? Because if a scammer bombards your PBX with traffic, it is likely that some of the fraudulent calls, being unable to connect via SIP, will fail-over to the much more expensive ISDN connection.

Block country prefixes

Most PBX’s allow customers to block outbound traffic to international numbers. So if you only conduct business domestically this is one of the best options available. Not only does it impose additional limitations on hackers, it is capable of preventing other less technologically advanced forms of toll fraud (such as late night staff making long calls to family members in other countries). Even if your business frequently needs to call international numbers, it is still unlikely that it will need to call all of them. As such, we recommended that you block all unnecessary destinations. Unless you have a clients or suppliers in these countries, this list of the top destinations for toll fraud call terminations might be a good place to start.

If your Telco also provides your WAN make sure you ask for a managed firewall

Telecommunications providers have a lot more experience with toll fraud than your average IT manager, and have become much more adept at configuring firewalls so as to minimise the chances of a breach as a result. If this option is available to you, we would suggest that you take advantage of it as it is going to make things a lot harder for the scammer.

Minimise the visibility of your PBX to the web.

If you are choosing to manage your own firewalls, wherever possible avoid leaving open ports available for staff to remotely access your PBX. Remember this is how most scammers are able to hack in, so avoid doing it unless it is absolutely necessary.

These are just a few of the techniques available and this list is far from all encompassing, but as with most technological scams, even implementing basic security measures makes a huge difference to how likely you are to be targeted. However, if you are interested in a more comprehensive solution, we would recommend talking to your telecommunications provider about what options they have available, and what they recommend for your organisation.

The post How to protect yourself from toll fraud appeared first on Over the Wire.

Understand how both SIP and ISDN technologies work and find out how this affects your business in this free report.

This report has been updated and now consists of 6 Major Advantages IP Voice has over ISDN.

The post 5 Major Advantages of SIP Over ISDN appeared first on Over the Wire.

“A Service Level Agreement is not a guarantee that your infrastructure will remain active for the specified uptime. Rather it is the minimum period of outage after which the business will receive a financial rebate, where this has been stated in the contract.”

For instance, a 99.95% uptime SLA (which is typical for the majority of business grade Ethernet services) has a maximum target downtime of 21 minutes and 55 seconds per month. Many IT Managers make the costly mistake of thinking this means that the service is guaranteed to be active for the remaining time period. It isn’t. The SLA simply means that come 21 minutes and 56 seconds, the customer will be able to claim some remuneration for any additional downtime experienced.

Why are the SLA’s not guarantees?

Using the example of a 99.95% SLA, 21 minutes and 55 seconds is more than enough time for a provider to fix the majority of network faults. However, infrastructure faults, which often rely on third parties to be resolved, can take much longer. For instance fibre cuts, ULL faults, and NTU failures are normally beyond the scope of the service providers control and as such require third party technicians to be physically present at the point of failure to be resolved. Depending on the fault, the remoteness of the area, number of services affected and the availability of qualified technicians, infrastructure failures may take several days to resolve.

Why does this matter if the provider has to compensate me?

Whilst an SLA may provide remuneration in the event of a service outage, the rate of remuneration is determined by the provider and is not linked to the actual loss incurred by the business. This means that the risk of a failure still needs to be weighed against the potential costs of one occurring. If the impact on the business is deemed to be unacceptably high it is strongly recommended that organisations consider utilising a redundancy package to mitigate the risk of an outage occurring.

What redundancy options are available?

Typical considerations for redundancy should include the following; however, it is recommend that all organisations consider backup links on a per-site basis so that the appropriate technology can be balanced against the cost.

• Due to their low cost and geographic availability, ADSL links are often recommended for the majority of sites.
• However if the site is in a remote location or there is a high risk of a large scale problem (e.g. flooding, bush fires, etc.), 3G and 4G backup links can be used. 3/4G is also recommended as a method of providing redundancy against terrestrial problems. For instance if a fibre cable, or other form of cable infrastructure is cut, it is likely that an ADSL connection will be affected as well, making 3/4G the most viable alternative. Microwave transmission can also be used to the same effect, however it comes with its own advantages and disadvantages. You can read more about the differences in connectivity options in this article on connectivity.
• The deployment of a second router to provide additional device redundancy can protect against hardware failure and get you back to work almost instantly.
• Due to a slow reduction in costs, protected fibre (fibre that takes diverse routes to the exchange) is becoming increasingly common as a backup option. Protected fibre comes with the advantage of being able to offer the same speed as the primary connectivity option.

Considerations should also be made as to whether there is a requirement for automatic or manual failover, as each of these options has the potential to affect the speed at which your service can be restored.

The next time your organisation is considering setting up a link to a new office, or upgrading an existing network, make sure you keep in mind that an SLA is not a silver bullet, and that the risk of an outage needs to be balanced against the potential costs of one occurring. 

The post Don’t Get Caught Out By Your SLA’s appeared first on Over the Wire.