Hosted Voice Improvements: What’s happening and why?

We’ve been working harder than ever – especially during COVID-19 and remote working – to improve our services and ensure that you and your colleagues are connected and working as normal. Over the next few months, we’ll be upgrading the infrastructure and delivery of our hosted voice services in a phased approach, starting with Multi-User VoIP (MUV), then SIP trunks and IAX trunks. 

What's happening and why?

We are changing the way that our hosted voice services are delivered. Our main focus is on migrating our hosting from a traditional data centre to Amazon AWS – a leading cloud service. This will mean greater resilience, better performance and a more scalable infrastructure.

If you have purchased a phone through Gradwell, we will be updating your phones automatically as the updates will be pushed out through our provisioning system. Handsets, headsets, conference units, DECT and other devices from the following vendors will be involved in these updates: Snom, Gigaset and Yealink.

If you use our SIP trunking services you will need to change the hostname for the trunk to register to the new platform – this information has been communicated to all SIP trunk customers. 

The update will allow us to provide these benefits:

Faster deployments

Infrastructure improvements will be rolled out faster.

Softphone updates will be released and provisioned more quickly.

Resilience

We can put in place failover protocols to enable almost 100% uptime in virtually any scenario.

New features

Our new infrastructure will allow us to add new features almost immediately, such as…

  • Higher-quality voice, using more modern CODECs to deliver enhanced performance over lower bandwidth connections. Note: G729 support is not available on this new platform.

 

  •  ‘Call answered elsewhere’ support. If you’re in a call group and someone picks up a call, it won’t count as missed, but it will be shown as ‘answered elsewhere’ as long as your chosen handset supports this feature.

 

  • Dedicated softphone application that provides a better user experience.

 

  • Busy Lamp Field (BLF), a function that tells you whether another extension connected to the same PBX is busy or not, is currently under development and is a new feature set to be released in the future.
Hosted Voice Updates

Do I need to do anything?

Most of our users won’t need to do anything. However, some users may need to update several settings on their devices. If you happen to be one of these users, we’ll give you plenty of notice before the upgrade takes place, and we’ll walk you through any small changes that need to be made.

All devices purchased and provisioned through Gradwell will automatically update but customers with devices purchased separately will need to adjust these manually – we have a full article about this here. In addition, your internet firewall settings might need updating to allow inbound traffic. To check that certain IP addresses are allowed to send traffic to you, click here for more information. We have many detailed instructions for you to read on our Knowledge Base.

How we're communicating this with you

If you’re a hosted voice user or have any of the devices mentioned above, we’ll be in contact with you via email, letting you know when your upgrade will be happening. We’re contacting both our customers with MUV services and partners who have customers with MUV services. These updates are designed to improve our services and the general experience with Gradwell.

Want to know more about your phone system?

Our Knowledge Base is full of helpful articles, billing information and FAQs. Use these guides to better understand your devices and self-support your communications.
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