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General Questions

What is the Skyetel network?

Skyetel is a SIP Trunking service that allows any PBX to access our carrier backbone. 

What makes Skyetel Different from other SIP Trunk Providers?

Simple: Reliability. The Skyetel Network was designed from the ground up to be dramatically different from most SIP Trunk Providers. Check out more here.

What PBXs do you recommend?

This is a hard question for us to answer. Every different PBX has its pros and cons, but we can offer a few suggestions.

If you are completely new to this industry, then FusionPBX or FreePBX are both great places to start. They're open source, free, and very reliable solutions. We use FusionPBX internally and tend to recommend that PBX the most. However, Asterisk (what FreePBX runs on) is generally more forgiving for newcomers than Freeswitch (which is what FusionPBX runs on). 

If you are more advanced, we recommend FusionPBX. It scales much better and Freeswitch is generally considered a superior platform to Asterisk. 

If you are looking for support and a product backed by a large company, then Avaya is probably your best bet. Avaya is used in many government institutions, banks, and other places where robust support and reliability are critical. 

How long have you been in business?

We were founded in 2014 as "SkyeBlue" and rebranded to Skyetel in 2016.

Porting

What is Porting?

Porting is the process of moving a phone number from one carrier to another. 

How long does Porting take?

This entirely depends on the carrier who is loosing the phone number. Some carriers are much better to work with than others. As a general rule of thumb, it takes about 1-2 weeks. But we've seen ports take 2 or 3 months. 

How long does it take to Port a Toll Free number?

About 2-4 days depending on the number. Toll Free numbers are much easier to port than local numbers 

Technical

Do you support SIP REFER?

Not yet 

What Codecs do you support?

Because Skyetel does not sit in the audio path of the call, we will accept all codecs including OPUS, G722, etc. However, the PSTN only accepts G711.

If you have multiple PBXs on your account with us, you can configure your PBX to offer a higher quality codec with G711 as a fallback. This will allow your customers to talk to each other using G722 or OPUS while reverting to G711 when they call the PSTN. This is also true if your PBX calls another PBX on the Skyetel network. (in those cases we will attempt to bridge the audio directly from one PBX to another to increase the call quality.) 

Do you transcode media?

No - Please make sure you offer G.711 with your call.

What is NAT and why does it hate me?

NAT stands for Network Address Translation and is what your router/firewall uses to allow many devices to share a single public IP address. NAT is a critical component of any network and some routers do it much better than others. 

VoIP was designed in an era before NAT and so was not built to use it. Its later been updated to include some limited support for it, but it fundamentally falls on the router to make sure that your VoIP phone or VoIP server connect successfully to the world. Most PBXs have techniques they use to help the router - so generally speaking, if you are using a good PBX and a good router, your won't have too many NAT related issues. 

Issues with NAT arise when you are using either a PBX with poor NAT support or a firewall with poor NAT support (or both).

What Routers do you recommend for production use?

Routers are the most important component of your network with VoIP. These are the routers we like most:

Ubiquiti Edgerouter Lite - for a office with less than 100 users
Ubiquiti Edgerouter Pro - for larger offices

Peplink Balance 20 - for a smaller office with less than 100 users
Peplink Balance One - for larger offices

Fortigate 100d - for offices with higher security concerns

Taxes

What are the taxes that are collected on my usage?

We collect Federal and State taxes on a minute-by-minute basis as required by law. The Federal taxes include the USF Contribution and a small Regulatory recovery charge. The FCC changes the effective tax rate associated with Telecom services quarterly and you can follow that along here: https://www.fcc.gov/general/contribution-factor-quarterly-filings-universal-service-fund-usf-management-support

What is does the "Tax Rate (Includes Regulatory Recovery Fees)" mean?

The Tax Rate summarizes all of the taxes and fees we have to collect from you into one category for easy reading. In an attempt to be as transparent as possible, we don't want you to have to do the math to find out how much you are paying in taxes.

We break down that summary as follows:

1. FCC FUSF Charges (in Q4 of 2019, the FCC charged 25% in federal taxes - crazy!)
   1. At the time of this writing, Skyetel files its taxes under the Safe Harbor provisions. This allows for Skyetel to simply assume that 64.9% of its telecom revenue (Usage + Phone Numbers, but not feature costs) is taxable under the FCC regulations. From that, we are subject to pay the quarterly adjusted USF charges (currently 25%). This means that the effective tax rate on telecom services is 16.225% for Q4, 2019
   2. On services that are not classified as telecom revenue (voicemail transcription, Caller ID, Spam Filtering, etc - we break this out in our Statements), we do not collect these taxes unless required by state law.
2. Regulatory Recovery Fees - these are fees we charge in order to be compliant with the various taxing agencies. We also use these fees to cover the costs of your taxes where we under collected
3. State/Local taxes - We apply additional taxes where required by various states and municipalities in those states where we are under nexus laws.

By default, our network asses a "Tax Rate" of 18.225%. That is broken down as follows:

1. 16.225% USF Fund Contribution
2. 2% Regulatory Recovery Fee

Please keep in mind that we do not asses these taxes on non-telecom revenue, so your effective tax rate (the amount you pay in total in taxes when compared to the total amount you were billed) will be less than these percentages. 

What if I'm tax exempt?

If you have a re-sellers certificate and/or a FCC Filer ID and are reselling Skyetel, send us a support ticket from the portal and we will remove any taxes you are exempt from. You will need to complete this form: http://www.skye.tel/fusf

What is a FCC Filer ID? 

If you are reselling Skyetel, and want to be tax exempt, you will need to file form 499A with the FCC to register yourself as a phone service provider. Upon completing that form, they will assign you a Filer ID. We are not tax and legal experts, so please contact an attorney familiar with these laws to get more information.

Surcharges

Do you charge any Surcharges?

Unfortunately, we have to. We don't like it anymore than you do, but we've found these Surcharges are necessary to protect our network's integrity and to keep scammers and spammers off the Skyetel Network. These Surcharges only impact a very very small number of our customers; most of our customers will never be charged a Surcharge

All of our Rates & Fees are published inside the portal here: https://login.skyetel.com/#billing/rates

Who is at risk for Surcharges?

Surcharges are not applied to all accounts - they are only enabled if your account has significant amounts of traffic volume and if your traffic patterns are over our thresholds. Additionally, we will do everything we can to work with you to correct any traffic pattern issues prior to applying surcharges. These surcharges are our "last resort" and are only intended to protect our network from abusive users. A good thing to remember - the purpose of the surcharges isn't to make money, its to protect our network.

While we do reserve the right to apply Surcharges to any/all of our accounts, as long as you are willing to work with us if your traffic is out of compliance, you won't have to worry about these charges . 

What Surcharges do you charge?

In addition to our regular rates, Skyetel charges the following Surcharges:

• Short Call Percentage
• Indeterminate Caller ID
• 0 Second Duration Calls

What is a Short Call Duration Surcharge?

A "Short Call" is a call that is less than 6 seconds long. Generally speaking, these short calls are caused by people who call your phone number, get your voicemail and then hang up. They are also caused by people hanging up immediately on a caller once they realize its a robocall. Spammers and Scammers have a much higher Short Call Percentage because they call many people at once, never leave a voicemail, or get hung up on very quickly. 

On average, a regular customer will have a "Short Call Percentage" of about 7-8%. This means, for 100 calls they place, 7 or 8 of them will result in them having a call under 6 seconds. Its very rare that normal users ever break 10%. A scammer or spammer will be much much higher - close to 60-70%. 

Based on these averages, we assess the following Short Call Duration Surcharges:

What is a Indeterminate Caller ID Surcharge?

Indeterminate Caller ID is when our customers place outbound calls through our network with Caller IDs that are not accurate and impossible to determine. For example, if a user places an outbound call through our network with the Caller ID of (000) 000-0000, that would be an "Indeterminate Caller ID" since it is not a phone number. Another example would be if the Caller ID is "350" or if it is empty. Spammers and scammers will intentionally break their Caller ID so they cannot be called back or identified by you or the authorities.

For our regular customers who simply have a typo in their Caller ID, we try our hardest to fix Caller IDs when we can. For example, if a customer sends us 360-986-5200, we will rewrite it to be +13609865200 for them automatically and do not charge them a surcharge. So, just like Short Call Duration, this only impacts a very small number of our customers.

What is a 0 second call?

0 second calls are calls that have a 0 duration. This is usually caused when a customer dials a phone number but before the recipient answers or it goes to voicemail, they hang up and "Cancel" the call. Most of our customers have an average 0 Second Call average of 4%. However, scammers and spammers will have very very high 0 Second Averages (60-80%) because they will call 10-15 people at the same time for every 1 agent. Since they initiate 15 calls when they can only possible talk to one at a time, they cancel a huge number of calls (which result in 0 duration calls). 

Conversational Traffic - 0 Second Call limit of 25% 

Autodialer Traffic - 0 Second Call limit of 40% 

Legal

Do you have an acceptable use policy?

Yes - you can download it here.

Do you have Terms of Service?

Yep - you can download those here.

Do you have a Privacy Policy?

Yep - that's available here.