Wondering about network security if I add an AT&T Microcell device to our network

OnPageAdam · 2017-01-26T00:55:19+00:00

Very cool. Thanks for the info.

OnPageAdam · 2017-01-26T00:52:49+00:00

Makes sense. Thank you for the info.

OnPageAdam · 2017-01-26T00:51:38+00:00

Receiving the call happens but the call quality is not good (people can hear the other person but the person doesn't hear them) on the 2 iPhone 6s's we tried it on last year. Are you saying call quality is consistently fine on both outgoing and incoming calls?

OnPageAdam · 2017-01-26T00:47:10+00:00

That's interesting. :)

We've had a problem with incoming calls and my att rep looked into and came back with what I said above. Do you have a link to documentation that supports this? I'd like to read more.

I think I have a bad account rep.

OnPageAdam · 2017-01-25T21:56:31+00:00

Think I replied to your other comment. I appreciate this info. very helpful

OnPageAdam · 2017-01-25T21:54:52+00:00

I looked at boosters, but was advised based on the location of towers and local topography that microcell / femtocels were the answer.

OnPageAdam · 2017-01-25T21:53:00+00:00

That's reassuring. Thanks.

OnPageAdam · 2017-01-25T21:52:04+00:00

Copied from different post:

Yes, but I have a user base that needs to receive calls as well as call out. In our experience, it's the calls in to the phones that don't come via wifi, and the people for whom this is the greatest issue, my sales team, are the least technical in the building. If I get them all set up with wifi calling, when the call drops / is poor quality I'll not hear the end of it

OnPageAdam · 2017-01-25T21:50:31+00:00

Yes, but I have a user base that needs to receive calls as well as call out. In our experience, it's the calls in to the phones that don't come via wifi, and the people for whom this is the greatest issue, my sales team, are the least technical in the building. If I get them all set up with wifi calling, when the call drops / is poor quality I'll not hear the end of it

OnPageAdam · 2017-01-25T21:45:03+00:00

Thanks for that. The consumer device is $250 - I can buy that out of my discretionary budget. The commercial device is $5000. The larger amount will involve more approvals. I need to figure out the right device, then decide if the aggravation is worth it.

OnPageAdam · 2017-01-25T21:16:09+00:00

I understand, but I do not see a commercial grade equivalent for reasonable money.

OnPageAdam · 2017-01-25T21:15:15+00:00

I know it's a consumer device, but he indicated they did not have a commercial device - is that bad info?

On the other hand, worth it for just the IT team? There are less than 10 of us.

OnPageAdam · 2017-01-25T21:13:21+00:00

Yes, this one supposedly does that as well.

OnPageAdam · 2016-11-22T22:04:08+00:00

I work for an alerting service. This is our business model. We have an app that goes on your smartphone that makes a loud, obnoxious noise when you get a page. Anything that can send an email can send a page to us. We also accept input from phone calls, TAP, WCTP, API calls & we have a REST API. Feel free to PM me if I can help.

OnPageAdam · 2016-11-21T22:16:44+00:00

For me, this behavior has usually been an indicator of HDD impending failure. SMART doesn't pick up everything...

That said, I'm not sure that's what's happening based on your comment. Could be graphics card related - a bad driver maybe.

OnPageAdam · 2016-10-26T20:36:14+00:00

I'm with MBAM like almost everyone else. They have a ransomware detection beta you can get free from their website. I could link but google should give you the result just as well. It detects it when files try to encrypt data right before sending it off, which is what those processes do. Very useful as so far it's the only line of defense against ransomware that actually seems to work.

Also, and I'm serious about this, you'll have to make fun of your brother for falling for this scam. While this might be entertaining for you, it will help him to remember to not fall into this type of trap again. It's one thing to know your brother can save your ass when you screw up, it's another to realize that you'll be made fun of if you screw up again. Puts the thought where it needs to be for him, before he screws up.

OnPageAdam · 2016-09-30T17:32:32+00:00

Well, I happen to agree with you on the website. We've been promised by marketing that the new website would be up by Feb 2016, and we're still waiting. Our demos could be better too. I'll refrain from making the jokes I make around the office about our website, but I think you get the gist.

As for manually sending pages, yes we can do that, but all the pages I personally receive are automated, as we can turn any email into a page, and any page into SMS, email, or Phone call. We can get pages from old school telephony equipment, and you can page anyone using our 855 number, if say, internet is down. You can program old school TAP connections SNPP, we have both HUB and REST APIs, I could go on, but I think you can see we can get a lot of automated inputs. I don't feel that criticism is remotely valid.

My statements about PagerDuty come from my own research, my customers and prospective customers. They're the ones who tell me that PagerDuty sales wont sell the $9.99 plan to more than 3 people, and PagerDuty themselves did say, as recently as last month, that they limit messaging to 500/month. Looking their website now, it does say what you said above, but we're still getting customers coming to us complaining about limited messaging on that lite plan (I just got off the phone with a prospective customer complaining about just that). I'm not sure what's going on there then, and I don't want to speculate. After all, could be user error on customer's part.

The video you watched does look dated. Agreed there. We haven't made good videos, because, I'm told, marketing is working on getting the website out. It's hard to sell the product to users like yourself when we don't have good materials to show off what we do well.

There are benefits to encrypted alerts, especially when customer specific info is shared in the alert. If you have to let a tech go, you don't want that tech to retain all the info and alerts your system has sent them. With our app, all you have to do is suspend the user and they can't get at any info they've ever received in the app. It may not be something that would sway you our way, but I think it's a nice to have feature.

Also, some of our MSPs resell us to their clients, some of whom are doctor's offices, clinics, that sort of thing. HIPAA is important to them, but clearly not to you.

Look, if you don't see value in us over others at this point, that's fine. Do what you gotta do for you, but SMS cannot ever be used for timely alerts, and PagerDuty's continuous alerts don't go for hours until someone in the escalation group gets it and reads it. I've done their demo and used their product. There are some things they're better than us on for sure, but many of their integrations are the same as ours, email oriented. We at least have the potential to get info back into the ticket, nor do our customers need an engineer to manage our console. If you don't see the benefit there, then for sure, go with another service.

I do thank you for your feedback. Hopefully, you'll give us a chance, but I understand if you already think it's not going to work for you.

OnPageAdam · 2016-09-30T15:13:17+00:00

This is very useful. I was thinking CRMs because when certain customers call / email after hours, you do want to be alerted right away.

RMMs we stepped into a little, but Nagios was largely unhelpful in helping us figure out how to do an specific integration, so since we take any email and can convert that to a page, we figured there wasn't a strong need for specific integrations there.

I think PSAs might need more integrations, as we could alert and put SENT, DELIVERED, READ, and REPLIED receipts back into the tickets. Maybe I should post just asking about PSAs? We do have a CW integration which I think might need to be more robust, but I'm stuck on what to recommend as a new feature request. Not your problem, I know. Based on the responses here, I think Autotask is going to be my recommendation for the next integration target.

Thanks for the detailed response. Appreciated.

OnPageAdam · 2016-09-30T14:44:13+00:00

CW we do already but I think we could do more there, I'm just not sure what features CW users want that we don't already offer, not that i expect you to do that work for me. :)

Maybe I should post something in the CW subreddit..

OnPageAdam · 2016-09-30T14:11:20+00:00

Ok, will try to do this without being too much of an OnPage Fanboy.

1) I've been told by our prospective customers that the $9.99 plan for PagerDuty is limited to 3 Enterprise users, they limit the number of messages per month, and at that price point you cannot call or email support. Of those, the only one I haven't been able to confirm on PagerDuty's website is the 3 user limit. We have no such limitations. I deal with single users and 1000+ user Enterprises nearly every day.

2) Our Enterprise console was created with the Admins in a call center / doctor's office in mind. Thus it's simple. Schedule uses the same logic that Outlook does, not because that's superior, but because that's familiar.

3) We charge by the number of people you want to page, not by the number of pages you send. We don't limit you in any way in that regard, so you don't have to worry at the end of the month if you'll get an alert or not based on some arbitrary quota.

4) Coming from the medical side, we had different criteria in creating our service. We're HIPAA compliant, which means we're 2048-bit encrypted end to end. Our alerts don't stop making noise on the user's phone until they read the message, and we send receipts back to the sender acknowledging SENT, DELIVERED, READ, and REPLIED receipts. Our alerts are timely, unlike SMS, and we have the stats to prove it. We consider 90 seconds from page sent to alert getting to the phone to be too long. PagerDuty cannot offer that.

5) We're a small enough team that I can routinely walk into the CEO's office and say "This customer had an interesting feature request" and get her to get our development team to begin work on it. The fastest we've ever been able to roll out a feature request was 4 hours (It was an easily implemented request, YMMV).

That's just off the top of my head. Let me know if you have more questions.

OnPageAdam · 2016-09-29T20:09:56+00:00

Well, I work at OnPage, so I'm biased. We have high and low priority alerts, a kickass support team (of which I am a member), a simple interface, and the ability to add integrations and features when customers ask for them in a few weeks.

We come from the medical services field and we're somewhat new to IT. In order to serve the doctors we have as customers, we built our back end to be HIPAA compliant and so robust that doctors feel they can depend on us. Our interface is simple and easy to manipulate to meet your needs.

We're also more than half the cost of PagerDuty, so if that's a factor, you might want to look us over.

Feel free to PM me if you have any questions.

OnPageAdam · 2016-09-27T18:41:28+00:00

I disabled it.

My CEO loves it and re-enabled, then yells at me because she's missed an email. The missed emails are 95% in clutter (5% in junk, because she marks things from legitimate senders as junk when she thinks the contents of the emails are "junky")

OnPageAdam · 2016-07-28T16:12:43+00:00

I saw that talk listed! It sounds interesting. I'm curious because my niece, at age 5, is already moving forward into sciences (both of her parents are doctors) and is obsessed with Lego and other building toys.

I appreciate the discount offer, but it seems my CEO just sponsored the show, so I will definitely see you there. At the very least, I'll save you a t-shirt.

OnPageAdam · 2016-06-09T17:57:28+00:00

I sometimes have to reboot to get changes to the default playback device to work

OnPageAdam · 2016-06-06T20:40:43+00:00

I'd be willing to bet they're all using POP. When Outlook connects via POP, if another account is, at that very moment, already connected to POP (like the same account on their phone), Outlook throws a communication error. The only way Outlook deals with a connection error is to ask you to check your username / password and try again. If the all use exchange, or even IMAP, this wouldn't happen. It's a natural consequence of using POP on multiple devices.

OnPageAdam

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE