We thought it was about time we updated the reseller community on what is happening at Gradwell this summer.

We are extremely busy on a number of fronts and hence have been trying to bring a few things to conclusion before sending this out but unfortunately events are taking longer than we had hoped. Suffice to say that with the holiday period is on us and this has not happened so we are giving you a status report.

Firstly a few facts for you:

• As from September, Matt Park, who has previously been doing evening and weekend support for us, is going to go full time as our reseller support person reporting to David Stockford. The aim being to give you a single point of contact for any issues you might have.
• We currently have 13000 numbers in use with an average of 4750 extensions logged on the service.
• We have 2000 SIP Inbound and 4000 IAX Inbound trunks
• We have ported over 2600 BT numbers to date !

Call minutes last month were

• Outbound 1.3 million
• Inbound 1.9 million

We have now agreed the specification and funding for our 2nd PSTN switch to interconnect with BT and Gamma in Leeds.

We are attending the Convergence Summit at Sandown Park on 9th to 10th October – Stand 31 – if any of you can get along we would be pleased to see you.

CURRENT DEVELOPMENTS

• 999 calls – all the development work has been done and we are in the process of training our Call Handling company to make sure the correct location details are provided to BT in the event that the automatic system fails. Planned Go Live is September
• Directory Enquiries – we are in the process of setting up Call tariffs to those 118 numbers that offer flat rate call charges. Planned Go Live is September
• Centrex onsite – We are in the process of rebuilding the provisioning system as a result of the feed back from the presentation in June, with the aim to have a beta release available in September and a number of you are on our list to carry out testing with release in Q4
• Lit lamps, Call pickup etc – these features are still in beta test and we hope to release the final version in Q4

OTHER DEVELOPMENTS

• Reseller Control panel – we have made numerous changes and enhancements to this including CSV download of the phone directory, allow customisation of customer access to control panel, etc.
• Reseller Customer payment options - we now have Paypal. Protx, HSBC and a generic payment faculty to add credit to your accounts.
• IAX/Asterisk - We have been carrying out load balancing/scaling trials on our IAX servers as well as stress testing on Asterisk and the latest version 1.4.10 is producing only a 1% call drop as opposed to 7% on 1.4.6 this testing will continue with a planned release in Q4
• Invoice Batching – We are implementing a new function that will batch invoices 3 times a day 8am, 1pm and 6pm this is to reduce the number of single line item invoices we produce.
• Pro-rata number rentals – we have implemented this feature so that new sign ups are charged the setup fee and the number rental based on the number of days to the end of the month divided by the number of days in that month e.g. Centrex sign up on 10th in 30 day mth = £7 x 0.67 = £4.69 plus VAT. The monthly invoice created on 1st month will be £7 for the month ahead which we feel is far easier for customers to understand.

  NB this applies to Co branded Resellers as White Label has always worked this way.

• New Website – I’m sure many of you will agree that this is an improvement on the previous version and we are now put the finishing touches to it to make it more comprehensive.
• Broadband – we are currently investigating whether we can supply a high quality broadband with a guarenteed quality of service across it.

Phone firmware – Please see below the latest versions and where to obtain them.

• Flexor 151 adapters - Version 2.21 of the firmware is now available , if you wish to allow a customer to upgrade to this release you have to update the “Firmware” field on the Camrivox provisioning database. Quick tests indicate that *1 is now working correctly.
• Grandstream GXP2000 - www.grandstream.com/firmware.html is announcing the new stable release for this phone is 1.1.4.18
• Grandstream GXP2020 - www.grandstream.com/firmware.html is announcing the new release for this phone is 1.1.4.17
• Linksys - Versions 5.1.8 (SPA941) and 5.1.10 (SPA942) have all 4 lines enabled by default - thus removing the need for a license key to be purchased.
• Siemens S450 IP – there is a beta release not yet available - additions are

  *) MoH Asterisk functionality working
  *) Ability to perform SIP transfers by using the phones menu
  *) Assign individual ringing tones to SIP accounts
  *) Dialplan rules for VOIP can be setup in the phones interface
  *) Assign unique ringtone to contacts
  *) “R” button flash hook functionality partially working

• SNOM also has made version 7 of it’s phone firmware available from it’s WIKI for download.