VoIP Spear Blog — News & Noise

We’re now offering pricing discounts for customers who pre-pay for multiple months.  We’ve been planing this for a while but it wasn’t until recently that we actually had the time to implement it.

Take a look at the discounts below.  We wanted to get pretty aggressive with the discount on 1 year plans and I think we’ve succeeded.

• 3 months: 5% discount
• 6 months: 10% discount
• 12 months: 20% discount

The savings can be quite substantial.  For example, if you are on the Bronze plan and you pre-pay for 1 year, your savings will be $60.00!

Let us know what you think.  Will these discounts get you excited about pre-paying for 3 months, 6 months, or 1 year at a time?

The VoIP Spear API is ready at last.  It’s pretty easy to use, though you can judge for yourself after reading the instructions.  The API is RESTful meaning that it’s lightweight and easy to learn.  I’d imagine it’s easier to learn a RESTful API rather than one based on SOAP or XML-RPC.

We have a few customers who have been asking for the API already, so it will be interesting to see what they can come up for VoIP Spear mashups and add-ons.

The VoIP Spear API is available to those customers who are signed up on the Bronze plan ($25 per month) or greater.  Check our prices to see if you can use the API with your VoIP Spear account.

One last thing: feel free to suggest any changes or additions to the API.  We’ve left some of VoIP Spear’s features out of the API because we thought they were unnecessary (in the API).  If you think differently, let us know.

It’s been two months since we launched VoIP Spear and we’ve learned alot in this time.  New users are signing up every day and it’s exciting to see people all over the world using the service.  The first thing I do each morning (and, indeed, several times throughout the day) is check to see who has signed up and where they are from.

I’m not sure if anyone has noticed, but there have been a few small changes to VoIP Spear in the last two months.  We’ve worked hard to make them as transparent as possible so the changes doesn’t interfere with the operation of the site.

We’re open to suggestions.  We aim to make VoIP Spear the best VoIP QoS monitoring service on the Internet, so we need the help of our users.  If you have a comment or suggestion for us, let us know by responding to this blog post or emailing us at support /AT/ toepoke.com.

VoIP Spear servers work by pinging our users’ endpoints.  Ping is a nearly ubiquitous network tool that is used to test whether or not a computer/device is reachable across the Internet.

One problem with using ping is that ping uses the ICMP protocol while VoIP uses UDP.  It was for this reason that we used UDP for testing when we first started developing VoIP Spear.  We were aiming to support two types of testing — basic testing would use ping/ICMP and advanced testing would use UDP.  We envisioned that basic testing would be perfect for novice users because it’s so easy to set up while advanced testing, on the other hand, would be more accurate and perfect for our advanced users.

After a few months, we realized two things:

1. Advanced testing would require users to run a VoIP Spear software app (which we called a UDP mirror because it just bounced back UDP packets to our servers).  This requirement would mean that our advanced tests could only be run on computers capable of running the software, thus excluding many VoIP phones and other endpoints.  In addition, the requirement to run/install software would have meant much lower adoption rates because it’s a pain to install software (especially software like the UDP mirror which needs to be running all the time on users’ computers).
2. The results from our basic tests (using ICMP/ping) were just as accurate as the UDP tests.

So we decided to change course slightly and only offer ping/ICMP testing.  It has meant that VoIP Spear is easy to use rather than a challenge.  This decision also forced us to implement testing from multiple servers, something which lends an even greater degree of accuracy to our tests.

We’ve been delighted with the decision so far.

VoIP Spear has only been live for a few weeks, yet we’re seeing good numbers of users signing up for service.  It’s nice to see the fruits of our labours.

One nice thing about going live is that we’re finally seeing how real people use VoIP Spear.  A few problems have come to light, the most common of which is that our VoIP testing isn’t working for some users — the MOS for their endpoints is always 1.0 (the lowest possible score).  We figured out pretty quickly that this is happening because their router or firewall is blocking ping/ICMP traffic, resulting in 100% packet loss.  VoIP Spear servers use ping/ICMP for running the tests to all of the endpoints.

The solution to this problem is to ask the affected users to unblock ping/ICMP traffic.  This certainly works, however we decided it was time to implement a support/help section in the web site.  It took a few days to create this and enter the content, however we’re finished now and pleased with the results.  We also think our users will appreciate having a resource to help solve their problems rather than having to email us.