May 172018
 
Digitally Accurate Inc. Logo

Looking for Calgary IT Managed Services or Calgary IT Consulting Services? We can help!

My company Digitally Accurate Inc. (https://www.digitallyaccurate.com/) has been helping businesses for almost 12 years with their IT strategies.

Feel free to reach out via E-mail, telephone, or LinkedIn to see how I can help! You can also visit the “Hire Stephen Wagner” tab, and yes, you’ll get to meet me! 🙂

My company is also partnered with numerous companies and can design, configure, and sell solutions including the following:

  • VMware Solution Design and Licensing
  • Veeam (Veeam Backup and Replication, Veeam Availability Suite, Veeam Backup Essentials)
  • HPE Servers, Storage, Networking
  • Aruba Networking
  • Microsoft Licensing (Including Office 365)
  • Sophos (Including Sophos UTM, and Sophos XG appliances)
  • 10ZiG Zero Clients
  • Duo Security (MFA)
  • Symantec (including Symantec Protection Suite)
  • Redhat (including RHEL: Redhat Enterprise Linux Server and Workstation)
  • Eaton UPS (Eaton Uninterrupted Power Supply and other Eaton power equipment)

Again, feel free to reach out for more information!

Dec 152017
 

The Challenge

Finding a cost-effective SIP trunk provider in Canada can be one of the biggest challenges that a business may have when trying to adopt VoIP technology. This is also a common problem for VoIP PBX re-sellers, as it’s hard to find a good provider to refer.

Back in 2007, just a year in to running my own company, my telecommunication and voice requirements massively grew. I needed a phone system to handle multiple extensions, call forwarding, conference rooms, follow-me services, rings groups, and needed the ability for staff and contractors to have their phones (and extensions) in remote offices or home offices. Also, I was travelling quite frequently so I needed to be able to have an extension running on my smartphone (so it would appear as if I was at the office, and to save on international roaming and long distance costs).

Implementing a VoIP PBX phone system handled all of this, and was very easy to implement however finding an SIP trunk provider was not. Originally I was using FXO/FXS adapters to pipe analog lines in to my PBX, however I wasn’t happy with the quality or the complexity of a solution. I wanted a true 100% digital, and 100% Canadian hosted solution.

The Solution (The Review)

After spending months researching providers, I came across a company called Iristel. There were numerous great reviews on the internet, and most importantly they had a following of Trixbox (Asterisk) users, so I could verify they would work with my PBX. They were a Canadian company (important to me), who provided SIP trunks at a great cost. I signed up for service, and tech support was actually amazing at providing assistance for configuring the SIP trunks with my Asterisk PBX, their sales staff was pretty awesome as well!

Here’s where the review gets boring (which is a good thing), I’ve been using them for around 10 years now, and everything has always just worked! I think in 10 years, I may have experience a single 1-2 hours of downtime, and this was due to a compatibility issue with Asterisk and their SIP gateways caused by an update (SIP registration bug). In this one-off case, tech support was immediately available and made configuration changes to resolve this issue. Outstanding service to say the least!

Over the years, I’ve also re-configured and deployed new PBXs. I’m now using FreePBX, and Iristel is still working great! AND YES, Iristel supports T38 faxing!

I would definitely recommend Iristel as a your VoIP SIP provider for your business digital telephony needs!

 

Feel free to reach out (comment) if you have any questions about my review, or the quality of the services.

Jun 142011
 

Well, I decided to upgrade to Shaw’s new “Business Internet 100 Plus” today. I decided to choose the option to pick up the Cable modem, instead of having scheduled a technition since I wanted to play with it today!

Got it done rather quickly over the phone. The plan also includes a phone line, which actually does have to be scheduled since it uses a different device that has to be installed by a Shaw tech.

Anyways, plugged in the new SMC Cable Modem. Noticed that it was an integrated all-in-one Cable/Router/Wifi. This concerned me as I thought I may have received the wrong unit. Plugged it in, noticed Wifi turn on (which concerned me even more). Shortly however, the WiFi turned off, and the “Bridge Mode” was enabled after it was automaticly provisioned by Shaw. (I confirmed this is what actually was happening later on when I spoke to tech support).

Had a few problems getting online. For some reason my account was limited for only 2 devices to have concurrent internet. This was odd and frusterating considering I have 6 Static IPs and should have over 10 Dynamic IPs. After a phone call to Shaw, they resolved this. I also got them to test the line, and all was good.

One interesting thing is that most of the speed test sites out there, actually don’t provide accurate testing since they can’t actually handle your bandwidth. The Shaw Speed test actually reporting a download speed of 98Mbps, and an upload spead of 4.97Mbps.

So far it ROCKS!

Update – July 21st, 2011

It’s been over a month now, and I’m still very satisfied. We had a few minor problems in the past on our old connection with the limitations of upload speed, both for pushing updates out to clients, along with our VoIP system that runs over our internet connection. With the new service, all issues no longer exist. I can actually utilize the internet connection, get the speeds I expect, at the same time use multiple lines on our VoIP system with absolutely NO issues at all.

The speed is still rock solid, the stability of the connection is also still rock solid. Absolutely no complaints whatsoever…