I have made the decision to deprecate our BYOT (Bring Your Own Trunk) feature at the end of this month.

The administrative overhead of this feature is high compared to the limited use, and I am constantly dealing with issues from those trunks from provider outages through to users cancelling their service without telling us and causing trunk failure alarms - in some cases that has also caused our own trunks to those providers to go down after our IPs have been blocked for failed authentication attempts.

As we move to our new call routing backend we are also changing our own external trunks from SIP registration to IP based routing so that calls can flow in and out of our network at any edge node rather than specific Asterisk nodes. This along with the auto-failover and dynamic number routing to support features like failover and “number porting” that is coming to end-user services makes it no longer viable to support BYOT.

Note
With this deprecation all BYOT trunks will be removed over the weekend of Aug 29-30 and impacted users will also receive an email notification over the next 24 hours. Any users with a BYOT who would like the trunk to be removed sooner can request so by replying to the email when received, or you can log a ticket now.

Your Options

When BYOT was initially launched, PhoneNet did not offer any outbound PSTN connectivity so this was provided as a way for users to get access to the PSTN from their PhoneNet services. Since we launched PSTN access the demand for BYOT has dropped and while we do have a unadvertised monthly call quota, only one user has ever hit this cap.

When BYOT is removed your services will route via our standard trunk routes and be subject to the call quotas.

If you wish to retain inbound PSTN access to your PhoneNet line(s) you have two options:

1. Obtain a number with a provider who can route via SIP URI and get in touch with us to get that routed to your service. Eligible providers will also need to be able to route from a consistent IP address range or SIP domain, and be able to route to a SIP URI ;or
2. Perform an action that makes you eligible for a complimentary number and we can provision numbers in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and Canada. At present the only action is to boost our Discord server if you are a member, although long term supporters and operators are also provided with this option.

For outbound calls we are also able to set your caller ID to your number when supported by our carriers after verifying it is routing to us, however for calls to the United States we are only able to provide “Attestation A” when we also provide the inbound number. If you bring your own number your calls will go out as Attestation B or C at our discretion.

It is also important to note that our PSTN connectivity is designed primarily for endpoints to give you a way to get to and from the PSTN from your IP phone. If you are running a PBX you are expected to setup your own PSTN trunks, and if you route a PBX worth of calls through us you’re likely to hit either the simultaneous call limit or your monthly call quota.

FAQ

1. Can I still use BYOT with an IP authenticated provider? No. This is something we’ve never supported. PSTN calls from PhoneNet can originate from ~6 different IP addresses, and as most carriers use the IP address to associate a call invite to an account each carrier could only have one trunk on it whether that be a PhoneNet trunk or a user BYOT.

2. Can I point inbound calls to an IP address not a hostname? While technically possible this would pin your inbound calls to a single node and you wouldn’t receive our enhanced features such as routing to your closest healthy node and automatic failover. We can also change the IP addresses of our nodes at any time and while we have our own processes to ensure that every interconnect is updated you would be responsible for ensuring this is always up to date.