Vonage has been very reliable to our companies over the past couple years. We have 4 sip trunks through them. Today however we were getting 1500 ms response times to the Vonage sip server they had us using (sphone1.voncp.com). This is totally unacceptable in a VOIP environment. Our Asterisk server would not work at this point. After about 2-3 hours on the phone this morning, I convinced the Level3 Vonage techs to give me an alternate address to try (it took 2-3 hours to get to the L3 guy.. I was on the phone with the L3 guy for 10 minutes). The IP (var1.voncp.com) worked like a champ. They are doing some kind of DNS round-robin or something to rotate the IPs for load balanncing, so it rotates between different IP address's. I found that one of them had < 20 ms response times from my datacenter. I talked to the Vonage L3 tech, and he said there is no problem if I wanted to use just that one IP instead of a DNS name. So, if you are having some latency problems with Vonage, ping var1.voncp.com several times until you get an ip that has a low latency, and configure your server (I'm using trixbox asterisk) with that IP. Here are some of my results: [root@trixboxxxxxxx asterisk]# ping var1.voncp.com
PING var1.voncp.com (69.59.252.178) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from proxy-var-outbound-01b.kewr0.s.vonagenetworks.net (69.59.252.178): icmp_seq=0 ttl=53 time=85.0 ms
64 bytes from proxy-var-outbound-01b.kewr0.s.vonagenetworks.net (69.59.252.178): icmp_seq=1 ttl=53 time=84.4 ms
64 bytes from proxy-var-outbound-01b.kewr0.s.vonagenetworks.net (69.59.252.178): icmp_seq=2 ttl=53 time=85.2 ms
--- var1.voncp.com ping statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 2 received, 0% packet loss, time 1000ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 84.777/84.803/84.830/0.292 ms, pipe 2
[root@trixboxxxxxxxx asterisk]# ping var1.voncp.com
PING var1.voncp.com (69.59.227.134) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from proxy-var-outbound-1c.klga1.s.vonagenetworks.net (69.59.227.134): icmp_seq=0 ttl=47 time=94.9 ms
64 bytes from proxy-var-outbound-1c.klga1.s.vonagenetworks.net (69.59.227.134): icmp_seq=1 ttl=47 time=94.8 ms
--- var1.voncp.com ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 95.820/95.820/95.820/0.000 ms, pipe 2
[root@trixboxxxxxxxx asterisk]# ping var1.voncp.com
PING var1.voncp.com (69.59.240.64) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from proxy-var-outbound-1a.klax2.s.vonagenetworks.net (69.59.240.64): icmp_seq=0 ttl=55 time=23.6 ms
The ONLY caveat to this whole thing, is you will have to get to a L3 Support team so they can update some XML files in their system that tell inbound calls how to route to your system. Mine worked right away, but some other Vonage numbers that we had forwarded to that inbound sip didn't work at all. After they updated their servers (took only minutes), everything was fine.
I hope this helps some of you Vonage sip trunk subscribers. They really do have a fantastic service. We bought our sip trunks from http://www.asterisk-vonage.com/
$175 a month for unlimited in, 5000 out, and unlimited simultaneous calls on one sip trunk (many providers do not allow this). Nice not to have to worry about a roll over ;)