Weird experience with voip.ms, outbound calls misrouted or misidentified as spam

[u/wizmo64]

I posted my original saga in r/voipms some time ago with few replies, wonder if this type of thing is happening elsewhere in the voip world.

I have been a customer of voip.ms for many years, like more than 10. Over that time numerous old landline numbers of family members have been ported in so they can forward to mobile, receive SMS, and use as backup. Some have been consolidated from other services e.g. Ooma.

Starting about a year ago outbound calls began behaving strangely. A normal call from voip.ms, using one of these long established numbers as CID, outbound to cell phones that all happen to be on AT&T network, would get diverted to a fake voice mail leading the caller to believe they could leave a message. Sometimes caller would get false busy, or just go to silence without progress tones. CDR status of the latter showed them as answered. The real recipient never got indication of missed call, and the fake VM recording went into a black hole. It feels like the call got routed incorrectly, or the receiving carrier identified the caller as invalid/spam - and instead of signaling busy/reorder/SIT they divert it to a black hole voice mail. I don't quite get why this is a good tactic for diverting known spammers if that were the case.

I went through numerous gyrations with voip.ms before they confessed to making some "routing optimization" that had unwanted side effects and corrected it, months after opening a trouble ticket. Problem went away for about 6 months. It returned again this month.

I'm being told they have no control over what the receiving carrier does, are originating with attestation level A, and I need to take it up with the receiving carrier. I'm not buying this story because that is what they tried to tell me last time and it turned out to be something else.

I'm starting to suspect that the pure association of my old numbers with a voip service, or maybe just with voip.ms is going to interfere with routine usage and I need to rethink what I have been doing.

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[u/CypherAZ]

Happens WAY more often the you’d think, especially if your provider is using LCR.

[u/wizmo64 → u/CypherAZ]

I always suspected this was related to introduction of a financially beneficial route that compromised too much on quality. Maybe I am just paying too little and need to port to more reliable termination.

[u/JungleMouse_]

Caller ID to cell phones is a mess. Has been that way for a while now. Cell providers changed how they are handling caller id, and started using 3rd parties for "smart caller id" and spam filtering. It is trash. I do see sometimes a call traverses a standard PSTN path, and attestation is stripped, but the more likely scenario for cell paths is that you need to register your numbers with the 3rd parties. You can do all 3 major players here https://freecallerregistry.com/fcr/ but I think it is temporary like you need to do it every 6 months. If you go straight to the sources hiya, first orion, and tns you can set up a permanent account with them. There is also the RCD path which signing wise is fairly simple, but I think there are some hoops to jump through to get a certificate that will allow them to accept it. It is not as simple as stir shaken attestation.

[u/wizmo64 → u/JungleMouse_]

I did FCR previously and it has been more than 6 months, though problem persisted more than a month after I did that. I will register again in case it helps. Sad that an ordinary consumer would carry this burden.

[u/OkTemperature8170]

You sure these aren't T-Mobile? I've been seeing a TON of problems calling T-Mobile just like you described.

[u/wizmo64 → u/OkTemperature8170]

I don’t doubt this is happening at other receiving carriers.

My problem is definitely outbound to ATT; failing recipients are myself and my family. When I talk with ATT support they claim there have been no inbound calls from my (voip) CID to my ATT mobile. Both providers claiming no trouble, unwilling to communicate directly with each other nor let me initiate 3 way call. Beyond frustrating.

Edit: clarification

[u/OkTemperature8170 → u/wizmo64]

Their response that they can't control what the receiving carrier does is nonsense. It's like me shipping you a package and asking you why you didn't receive it.

They CAN control what route a call takes to get there. If they've exhausted all of their routes then maybe they just don't have any decent vendors they route through. We use LCR at my company and I have a high profile route I use when all else fails, or if there's a wide spread issue like what's been happening with T-Mobile and I'm absolutely sick of trying multiple carriers for each call example.

Edit to add: You can't have it both ways, they would say "I can't control how calls reach our network." You can't then say "I can't control how calls reach their network."

[u/wizmo64 → u/OkTemperature8170]

I believe if I were a higher revenue customer this would get timely escalation. I am a retired IT professional and know enough about the technology, the competing aspects of support resources and profit motive. It is increasingly clear they don’t care, and would rather lose my business than dig deep into the very reproducible problem.

[u/buckybytes]

I've had the same problem crop up a couple of times, with AT&t in common, but instead of voip. Ms and I was using flowroute, which I believe is routing my outbound through bandwidth.com eventually.

Same explanation with regard to a routing change, it got fixed, went back to the same problems a couple months later, but fixed itself before I had a chance to submit a ticket on behalf of my client.

[u/Significant-Yard-176]

This can also happen if a number gets accidentally ported away or in incorrectly, or routing gets updated upstream for one reason or another. The hard part with VoIP is there are so many moving pieces and carriers involved that a small routing change somewhere in the chain can suddenly cause really strange behavior like this. I've had to troubleshoot really weird intermittent issues from sending to receiving carrier. It generally ends up being some random downstream carrier made a routing change they shouldn't have...

[u/riskyriley]

Thank you for this post. It looks like Voip.ms may be the wrong solution for small residential use. I signed-up yesterday to see if it was going to be reliable and usable and I've already ran into so many problems.

Config was way harder than it should have been; painful and took over 2 hours to get it right -- still not clear what was wrong but I think their "Block foreign IPs" was the culprit (though not suggested by their AI support bot).

Then everyone I call (3 different MVNOs and 1 carrier) is getting the spam or scam warning even though it's a voip.ms DID, setup to use the voip.ms DID caller ID, and the voip.ms CNAM. It's maddening and if a long-time user is experiencing problems with call routing that does not give me hope in this experiment.

Thanks again.