Voice and collaboration
When the phones have to work
A phone system is the one application everyone notices the moment it fails. We design, fix and move enterprise voice: the call manager, the gateways and session border controllers, the carrier trunks, and the cloud calling platforms they connect to.
You might be here because
- Calls fail or lose audio, and each vendor says the fault is somewhere else.
- You are moving to Webex Calling, Zoom Phone or Microsoft Teams and need it to go right the first time.
- A carrier change, an upgrade or a new site is coming, and the person who built the system has left.
- Your team runs the system day to day and needs a second set of eyes on a design.
What the work includes
- Troubleshooting
- Calls that fail, drop, or lose audio in one direction. Interoperability problems between a phone system, a session border controller and a carrier. We capture the evidence, find the cause, and fix it with your team watching.
- Migration to cloud calling
- Moving from an on-premises phone system to a cloud calling platform: a full inventory, a design for the target, a plan for the weeks both systems run together, and a cutover in groups, each with a documented way back.
- Design and deployment
- Call control, dial plans, gateways and session border controllers, SIP trunks to your carriers, and emergency calling. Built to be operated by your own team afterward, and documented so they can.
- Carrier and trunk changes
- Moving to a new carrier or to SIP trunks, including keeping your own carrier with a cloud calling platform. Number porting plans, interoperability testing and a tested fallback.
- Health checks
- A review of an existing voice environment before an upgrade, a carrier change or a migration: what is at risk, what is undocumented, and what to fix first.
- Contact center and call flows
- Auto attendants, queues and call routing designed on paper first, tested path by path, and documented so the business can change them.
Example scenario: a regional hospital
One call in twenty failed, and every vendor blamed another
Nurses calling patients' families heard a fast busy signal about one time in twenty. A second attempt usually worked. The carrier found nothing wrong on its side, the gateway logs showed calls leaving normally, and the ticket had been open for six weeks.
Read what we didWhat you get
- A written finding for every problem: the cause, the evidence, and the fix
- Design documents and as-built configuration records
- A test plan with the results, including the failure cases
- Runbooks for the tasks your team will repeat
Technology we work on
Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Unity Connection and CUBE. AudioCodes and Ribbon session border controllers. Webex Calling, including Dedicated Instance. Zoom Phone, including bring-your-own-carrier. Microsoft Teams Phone with Direct Routing. SIP trunking to carriers.
Software from the same engineers.
After enough nights reading traces by hand and enough migrations that began with an incomplete spreadsheet, we wrote software for the parts of the job that should not depend on luck. It is called CollabPlane. We use it on our own engagements, and your team can license it.
CollabPlane Workbench
SIP and call troubleshooting
Read traces and captures as call ladders, compare a good call with a bad one, and capture from the device.
CollabPlane Vector
Phone system migration to cloud calling
Discover the existing system, map it to the new platform, then provision, verify and roll back in controlled steps.
CollabPlane Studio
Call flow design and configuration
Design call handling on a canvas, then generate the configuration for each platform that has to carry it.
Questions we are asked
Can you help if we do not know where the problem is?
Yes. That is the usual starting point. We begin with one failing call and follow it across every device we can see until the evidence shows which one is responsible.
Do you work alongside our carrier or our vendor's support team?
Yes. Much of the work is producing evidence precise enough that a carrier or vendor can act on it: the call identifier, the time, and the exact message that was wrong.
Will you migrate everything at once?
No. We migrate in groups, starting with a small one that includes one of every kind of user and feature, and we verify each group before the next.
Can our team keep running the system afterward?
That is the goal. Every engagement ends with documentation and a walkthrough, and training where it is useful.
Related articles
All articlesVoice
The call that fails one time in twenty
Intermittent call failures are the hardest voice problems to fix. A method for finding the cause when a second attempt usually works.
Migration
Before you move your phone system to the cloud, count the fax machines
Cloud calling migrations rarely fail on users and phones. They fail on the things nobody listed. What to look for before you set a date.
Network and security
Why voice breaks when you replace the firewall
A firewall replacement that passes every security test can still degrade phone calls. The four places to look, and how to prevent it.
Other services
Network and security
Campus and wide-area networks, firewalls and segmentation, data center and cloud connectivity.
About network and securityTraining
Instructor-led training for engineering teams, built around how the technology is used in real networks.
About trainingProject engineering
Experienced engineers for projects your team does not have the people or the time to complete.
About project engineering
Tell us what is going wrong, or what has to go right.
Describe the environment and the problem or the project. An engineer will read it and reply.
Or call 854-260-2732