​​ Ray Baum's Act includes, according to section 506, that any multi-line telephone system (MLTS) used by a telecom company or VoIP Service providers, like Flowroute, must be able to provide 911 dispatch for any location in the US. This needed public-safety answering point (PSAP) information is required by Flowroute when associating an enhanced 911 (E911) address to a TN (telephone number). When using the E911 product in Flowroute, the customer gives the emergency dispatch identifiable informa...

Washington (WA) Point of Presence is being decommissioned on Oct 7, 2021 - at 10 am PT To migrate from aging third-party equipment, Flowroute is ending service to US-West-WA Edge Proxy (EP/PoP). We are asking our customers to use the US-West-OR (or closest) EP going forward. The change will affect any PBX which directly specifies the WA PoP by IP or has cached DNS records. The decommissioning of WA PoP is permanent and will not be restored at a later date. Affected Edge Proxy Information: ...

As some of you know, we’re using Statuspage (https://status.flowroute.com/) to communicate about incidents and scheduled maintenance. Statuspage is a communication tool where we publish and send incident notifications to affected users. ------------------------- Why are we using Statuspage? Today you expect a certain level of transparency. When things go wrong, we need an easy way to communicate about those incidents. Using Statuspage as the single source of truth for all incident communicat...

For inbound calls to customers, our current plan is to provide both of the following STIR/SHAKEN-based insights: - TN validation info via the ‘verstat’ tel URI, a parameter in either the P-Asserted Identity (PAI) header field or the FROM header field. This parameter will contain one of the following 3 values denoting the result of a TN validation check: - TN-Validation-Passed - TN-Validation-Failed - No-TN-Validation - If we get a "TN-Validation-Passed” result in the verstat,...

Flowroute provides customers with the option to purchase and use international local and toll-free inbound numbers (ITL, ITFS) in addition to domestic local and toll-free numbers. Flowroute has relationships with carriers to connect origination calls to the destination while following industry standards of operation. When a customer makes an outbound call to an international destination, they are required to utilize a valid, legitimately-assigned domestic North American billing Automatic Number...

What is the new CCRF rate? Beginning Oct 1, 2020 12 AM UTC, the Carrier Costs Recovery Fee (“CCRF”) will be assessed at a rate of 15%. Why is this increase happening? The primary driver is the FCC’s recent expansion of the contribution base for IP captioned telephone service (“CTS”), supported by the telecommunications relay service (“TRS”) Fund, to include intrastate voice communications services. In the past, only interstate voice providers (telecommunications and VoIP) were required to con...

Flowroute is now a BCM One company. This change means different wire and ACH information. Any previous wire information has been replaced by the BCM One configurations. Please do not use any wire information not provided by Flowroute support. We cannot guarantee returns or replacements of any wires incorrectly sent to an account not detailed by BCM One wire information. Using other wire information is not Flowroute detailed will require interactions with the wire information sent to any type of...

Please include the following information for each failed call: 1. Originating Number: 2. Destination Number: 3. Start Date / Time / Timezone: 4. Result (ex. Error Message, etc): 5. Authorization To Place Test Calls (Y/N): [For Linux-based systems] tcpdump -s 3000 -w ~/flowroute-[your ticket number].pcap port 5060 or portrange 10000-35000 If you don't have the tcpdump, it should be available through your distribution's package manager or from http://www.tcpdump.org/ ...

How an active email serves both you and Flowroute Flowroute provides some of the best customer support experiences in our field. We keep a communication channel open with any our customers with the same respect for everyone regardless of activity and spend. This gives us a wonderful "customer-to-company" connection that should make every contact with Flowroute be a simple, informative, or intensive dive into any of the needs a problem should reveal. We look forward to all of our customers h...

As attacks become more sophisticated, it is always good to make sure that your Asterisk system is as secure as possible. The following article provides base information on locking down and securing your Asterisk PBX. - To make brute-force attacks on your system more difficult by not revealing valid extensions on your system, add the following line to the appropriate *.conf file—for example, sip.conf or sip_general_custom.conf: alwaysauthreject=yes - To bind your Asterisk phone sys...

For the highest possible audio quality on your Flowroute calls, you should implement a network Quality of Service (QoS) (https://support.flowroute.com/053881-What-is-QoS) strategy that prioritizes Flowroute's Direct Media (https://support.flowroute.com/812832-What-is-Flowroutes-Direct-Audio-system) packets. One or both of the following QoS strategies should be used: - Give priority to UDP traffic (RTP audio) on your network over all ports within your phone system's RTP media port range[1]...

To ensure you receive all audio on your Flowroute calls, specific Port Forwarding/NAT policies should be put in place on your network. The following two Port Forwarding network address translation (NAT) policies are required: - SIP signaling (call control): Forward UDP and TCP traffic on port 5060[1] (#note1) to your PBX's local IP address.[2] (#note2) - RTP media (call audio): To reduce latency, Flowroute uses Direct Media. (https://support.flowroute.com/136672-What-is-Flowroutes-D...

IMPORTANT: - Details in this document are for reference only and are unsupported by the Flowroute support staff. - Please use as purely reference material; we make no guarantees that this information is correct, or will not harm your system. Please be careful and always keep a backup of anything before you make changes, or alter settings. The custom tag field on Call Detail Records (CDRs) is populated from the optional X-Tag SIP header field, which you can specify on eac...

Flowroute has instituted an Admin Fee, as per FCC regulation approval, to provide its customers with the best of upcoming technologies, new innovations, and continue the kind of the excellent customer support Flowroute offers to all its customers. The fee is broken down into two types. Flat Rate Conditions: For customers who have a Flowroute account and do not own DIDs, the Admin fee will be a flat rate of $15 per month. This also includes customers who are actively using Flowroute as a SI...

Checking your current registrations on the Flowroute Manage site for registered PBX If you are using Registration for your Flowroute connection, a quick way to review if you are assigned to the modern PoPs is using the registration page on Flowroute's Manage site under the Interconnection (https://manage.flowroute.com/accounts/interconnection/) tab for the heading: Status. If you are registering with your PBX to Flowroute you will find a location under "PoP (Point of Presence)" and an IP u...

To help you better understand the Nevada PoP Retirement and what to expect Your PBX connects to Flowroute's network using IP addresses Or SRV (Service Record ie. www.flowroute.com). The Interconnection page is available to identify currently registered and to adjust routes for preferred inbound PoPs. The Nevada PoP (sip.flowroute.com / 216.115.69.144) will be decommissioned June, 11 2020 at 12pm PST. The interconnection page will provide you with the information needed to check if you're still...

Flowroute is pleased to provide our customers with a safety-first approach to our existing 9-1-1 emergency services offering. 9-1-1 is now, by default, available for every account using Flowroute as its SIP provider. This means that even if you do not have an E911 profile assigned to a DID on the account, you will be able to receive emergency support from dialing 9-1-1. Any number assigned to an existing E911 address on that account will be given the same treatment as an account without an...

Unfortunately, there are times when account access is lost via an email decommission or the loss of an employee or a partner leaves a firm. We need to take a firm stance on any account ownership disputes to keep Flowroute in good legal standing and protect our customers. An account owner, who owns the email account for which the email is registered on the account, is the only one who can act on the account. If anyone claiming to be an account owner is denied access, without the consent ...

Flowroute supports three-digit dial plans as regulated by the FCC and are offered for use in our services. Included in this suite of dial plans: 711 - Text Telephone (TTY) services are also supported by Flowroute. These services are provided for the deaf and hard of hearing population which requires and relies on having additional assistance in voice services. TTY makes it possible for the deaf and hard of hearing to successfully make phone calls to users of regular phone systems. 911 - T...

When devices communicate across the Internet, they send messages to one another. These messages are similar to mail in that they have a ‘to’ address and a ‘from’ address. The ‘to’ address is the IP address of the device it wants to send the message to, and the ‘from’ address is the IP address (and port number) to send any return messages to. One of the rules of private IP addresses is that they should never be seen on the Internet because theoretically millions of devices could share that IP ad...

Flowroute restricts a single user account to 24 simultaneous SIP registrations. This is a high-level threshold for SIP registrations. Beyond 24 SIP registrations identify a need to explore a better process. We will discuss here, some options and define the reason for SIP registrations. The SIP registrations are on the Interconnection > Status (https://manage.flowroute.com/accounts/interconnection/) section. You may see any SIP registrations on the account. NOTE: The SIP registrati...

Toll-free does not support the CNAM service. A toll-free number is considered an inbound only DID (meaning it is only to accept calls and not generate outbound calls). Due to this classification, the CNAM service is not offered.

NOTE: The FCC requires that providers of interconnected VoIP telephone services using the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) meet Enhanced 911 (E911) obligations. E911 systems automatically provide to emergency service personnel a 911 caller's call back number and, in most cases, location information. E911 is a service Flowroute provides to our customers as a way to connect to emergency services. The E911 service provided is within compliance regulations. As such E911 collects and ...

To maintain integrity on our network as high as possible and to help protect our customers, Flowroute has implemented additional fraud prevention functionality. The following tips enable you to apply added security to your VoIP deployments. In this article - Prevention Tips (#prevention) - Change the Maximum Default Rate (#maxrate) - Set up a Destination Whitelist (#whitelist) Prevention Tips If you operate one or more PBX systems on public IP addresses, we urge you to conduct ...

Reliable documentation verifying active service on your porting telephone numbers can assist in resolving many issues that arise when attempting to port phone numbers from a losing carrier. Flowroute often has to request customer assistance to provide proper documentation during the process if the document is not correct at the onset. NOTE: If you are porting multiple telephone numbers, they must all be listed on the documentation under one account; if the telephone numbers are on multi...