Most times, when you read pages like this, you see claims of using equipment like Cisco and all that sugar-coated goodness used by the majority of businesses. Well, you won't see that on our network. Don't get us wrong - there is nothing wrong with those brands. However, we don't like them. They are not for us. We enjoy thinking outside of the box. Let us show you what we do use.
We own our software. We don't have systems like Broadsoft that a lot of the bigger telcos use - they cost your arm, leg, and possibly your first child. By the way, they are also great systems - but we prefer to invest that money back into our software. So the only cost we have is our exceptional staff that make it all happen. The majority of our software is based on open source technology (why re-invent the wheel?) such as Kamailio & Freeswitch. We do not use Asterisk. We are sorry, all you Asterisk fans out there, but Asterisk is just not for us. We have spent years investing, creating, and securing one of the largest redundancy networks, which has been highly customized to just the way we like it.
DELL supplies all of Crazytel's core equipment. Ubiquiti Networks connects our network core equipment.
In our Network Operations Centre, we have over ten 32-inch screens monitoring our entire network, 24/7. If something goes down, we will know about it instantly! But don't worry, our redundancy systems will immediately kick in, and within 60 seconds everything will be back to normal.
We have several network engineers, Linux and open-source VoIP network specialists around Australia & the USA. The majority of our staff - even our legendary call centre staff - have a background in VoIP, some of them at an engineering level. We also have in-house developers our business runs 24/7.
We say this word a lot. We are proud of our network. We don't mean just redundancy in our datacentres, like battery or generator back up. That won't do! If one of our locations has an issue, two scenarios can/will happen.
First Scenario: your phone and VPN connection - or either one of them, depending on the issue - will disconnect and then automatically connect to another location within 60 seconds. How? Well, that's been programmed into all of our devices, and the way we have designed our network gives us this power (we aren't going to tell you all our tricks).
Second Scenario: if one of our locations plays up - fibre break, hardware failure, or thousands of different issues - well, no big deal! As soon as our operations team sees that one of our systems is offline or stuck (alarms start going off), they can press a big red button that one of our excellent engineers created. Yes, we do have big red kill buttons as you see in the movies, and it kills the entire Crazytel specific network in that location. And all devices from ATAs, IP phones, VPN connections will failover to the second location - so all your devices will be 100% back to normal all within 60 seconds.
During outages, most carriers rely on a backup system in the same location (which is not great, if it is a data centre/connectivity issue). These connectivity issues can only cause headaches for them and their clients. We don't like our call centre phones ringing with angry customers! And, to be honest, we don't like running around like a chicken with our head cut off - we enjoy a calm workplace and to fix problems after making a coffee. That is why we can take any location offline, and most times you would not even notice!
Our Carrier Department is continually negotiating with tier one carriers around the world. We don't just use the standard carriers that are available in Australia, unlike some other providers.
We are adding more sites to our network all the time - we are currently working on our South Africa location.
We spare no expense when it comes to our network - we are continually adding and improving our network every day.
