This is an important change which may break your inbound call routing if you have misconfigured certain things. We recommend you check ASAP, and certainly before August 31st, if you are affected by the below.
We have always been flexible with codec handling and all our equipment is configured to give customers their first choice, and take on the burden of transcoding where necessary. This is not changing even though the easier approach our competitors take is to force our codec preferences on your.
We’ve also offered two levels of DSP, both hardware. The primary and default is on our hardware gateways that also mediate with SS7 and is where prefer to handle media, transcoded or not. The second is also hardware but int he form of cards attached to our main media gateways. These serve more exotic codecs and should be used in the minority of cases. This is not changing either.
On inbound number configuration we also offer the ability for you to control the codec choices we offered you. This is intended as an extreme edge case where your equipment could not handle the codecs it was asking for, and thus we could only offer you ones it could – older version of Asterisk and G729 being the main example use case. One consequence of this however is that media is forced through our main customer facing gateways even if transcoded in hardware, increasing traffic there and adversely affecting that media with increased load. For a minority of edge cases this always worked fine but we have noticed a number of customers using this feature by default and potentially adversely affecting their own media and all other media which has to be handled in that way. We see little to no reason for doing so and the original reasons for the feature existing no longer really apply. As such this feature will be removed on August 31st.
Our Operations Desk will be in touch with the dozen or so customers configured in this way and we strongly recommend you manually remove the configuration and test, long before we remove it on August 31st. By doing so before then you can modify your equipment’s config if there are any adverse consequences whilst the feature is there to fall back on.
