Project: Forwarding a Mauritian phone no via VoIP. Anybody interested?

Some person calls our Mauritian phone number and the call will be forwarded to a German landline number. Normally, this would cost us like 75 Rs per minute. With VoIP it's 0.4 Rs per minute or even completely free.

Some person: does it matter from where they call ? globally anywhere ?

When I go to Europe, I transfer my calls to my French mobile, for a couple of Rs 5.40/min with Emtel.

That's not that of a big deal and it's reliable Where does your Rs 75/min come from? If this is what Orange charges for call transfers to Europe, switch to Emtel

(I was in the VoIP business before and I would strongly discourage any serious VoIP on a MyT connection.)

Hi iJulien,

When I go to Europe, I transfer my calls to my French mobile, for a couple of Rs 5.40/min with Emtel.

If I get you right you mean:
1. You have a local phone/emtel provider
2. You go to France and arrange before with Emtel that when someone calls you on your local number in Mauritius they forward it to your number in France ? and the person that calls you pays same local MRU fees while you pay for their call a difference of Rs.5.40 / min on top ?

Trying to understand if I appear utterly dumb, then am unfortunate - can't do a brain change

That's definitely it.

The call transfer with Emtel is billed like a regular phone call, and you pay for it. The caller only pays for a call to Emtel, no difference for him.

You can enable call transfer without having to call Emtel, just use the corresponding menu in your phone.

You can enable call transfer without having to call Emtel, just use the corresponding menu in your phone.

Ok. I forgot to mention, do you need to have 2 different numbers ?
Like lets say i arrive in europe, get a new number there, i use the Emtel SIM, go in the menu, set it up, then put in the new sim and thats it ?

You could also use roaming: incoming calls are about the same price as call forwarding, outgoing calls are very expensive on the other end (because charged by the operator in the country you're in).

If you want to be able to enable call forwarding abroad, you need to have roaming enabled on your SIM and it may/may not work depending on the network you're connected to (it should work for most European operator though).

However, for simplicity's sake, I would enable call forwarding before leaving (eg. at the airport) and at least try once before during business hours (this way you can call customer care/go to a showroom if something goes wrong). You just have to get a German number, either using VoIP or by asking a friend to get you a SIM card over there.

Why is it worth checking before? Depending on your contract, international call forwarding is not necessarily enabled and you may have to sign paperwork to enable it.

Hi guys,

very interesting about the emtel vs. orange thing. Will try to find out more..

The 75 Rs were just an estimate derived from some of the numbers you can see on http://www.orange.mu/mobile/roaming_abroad.php

Yes, I know how hard it was to get a stable VOIP connection in MRU, but I heard wispers that MT had stone-age servers running and recently got new ones.. When did you do your tests with VOIP?

I don't know that much about Orange since I am with Emtel

About VoIP connection here, I use on a personal basis on SIP account to make/receive calls (the SIP proxy is in France) and it's not 100% reliable, which understandable because of the standard deviation in pings.

Here's what you get from my connection:

                              My traceroute  [v0.81]
Juliens-iMac.local (0.0.0.0)                           Mon May 14 11:44:49 2012
Keys:  Help   Display mode   Restart statistics   Order of fields   quit
                                       Packets               Pings
 Host                                Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
 1. 10.0.0.1                          0.0%    33    1.1   1.7   0.5   2.5   0.6
 2. 197.224.x.x                       0.0%    33   52.3  51.7  22.2 189.4  36.8
 3. 196.20.x.x                        0.0%    32   65.1  63.6  22.0 157.0  42.4
 4. x-x-x-x.telecomplus.net           0.0%    32   40.5  61.2  23.5 228.5  47.2
 5. if-5-0-0.har1.PV0-Paris.as6453.n  0.0%    32  261.9 288.7 237.6 406.5  46.3
 6. if-8-2.tcore1.PVU-Paris.as6453.n  3.1%    32  243.7 286.4 238.7 421.8  43.3
 7. GE5-1-4.BR1.PAR2.ALTER.NET        0.0%    32  259.6 276.9 238.9 391.8  38.9
 8. so-2-2-0.XT2.PAR2.ALTER.NET       0.0%    32  237.8 262.9 237.8 341.0  28.1
 9. so-2-1-0.CR3.PAR4.ALTER.NET       0.0%    32  280.3 287.9 239.1 393.0  46.6
    so-2-0-0.CR4.PAR4.ALTER.NET
10. GigabitEthernet1-0.GW3.PAR4.ALTE  0.0%    32  265.7 277.8 238.9 415.8  41.4
    GigabitEthernet2-0.GW3.PAR4.ALTER.NET
11. x.x.x.x                           0.0%    32  239.7 278.0 239.1 418.9  45.4
12. x.x.x.x                           0.0%    32  248.7 277.3 239.6 424.2  42.2
13. x.x.x.x                           0.0%    32  247.2 285.1 240.5 359.5  38.8

The issue seems to be with the DSLAM because I have more or less the same deviation all along the route (ie. no increase). However, today is a good day: I have seen worse deviations

One thing to consider is also the SLA of your ADSL connection

Yes, bandwidth isn't really the issue (even the G.711 codec needs only about 80 kbit/s), but we where using a 4M line before and VoIP calls were quite reliable, so I assume there is also some kind of traffic shaping going on.

I'm currently looking into collocating our GSM gateway in a Mauritian data center. Probably doesn't get more stable than that. I'm curious what their quote will be..

Thanks for the traceroute by the way. Will use that as the baseline. What kind of internet connection do you have?

This is really interesting. I was just about to jump onboard with Harald's idea, but then I read Julien's message, and Rs 5 a minute is not that bad really. The support issue I think is the biggest problem (what happens if there is a local break-in, power outage, flooding etc) ...

If Orange is more expensive, you can always forward the call locally from your Orange number to your Emtel number (local tariff), and then let Emtel handle the international forward

The downside would perhaps be that you rely on two local providers for your calls, but since they share the same infrastructure locally anyway it should not really matter...

I still think the easiest way is to simply put a forward on your MRU number, regardless of the provider, and then do the "hi there, just a minute and I'll call you right back", and then you use your favorite VOIP solution to call MRU at human rates from Europe or wherever you are...

That's exactly my point: why bothering setting up an unreliable infrastructure where Emtel can do it for you in a more reliable way for Rs 5? Especially if you need to pay for the GSM gateway, electricity and Internet. You really need to have a high volume to make it profitable, especially if you want a great uptime.

About Orange, I really don't know how they work, but on Emtel you can choose to use Mauritius Telecom's ILD as well, so maybe you can use Emtel's on Orange. You could check with Emtel.

Anyway, I wouldn't recommend using to call forward as you won't know who to blame in case of an issue.

As a matter of fact, we have the GSM gateway already. From Thursday I will be in Mauritius for a couple of days at test both the Emtel solution and the gateway. Will keep you updated..

Hey guys,

we just did some first testing with the GSM gateway and it works like a charm! Right before that I was talking with the same landline via Skype; connection quality via GSM was notably better.

Will do a call with Emtel as well but check the invoice before I use it in production..

Greets,
Harry

P.S.: I was testing on a 1M Orange ADSL Business connection.