WTF Digium? Awarding a Scammer for Innovation?
Today is a very sad day. Word has it that Digium has awarded an innovation award to DIDx, a company that has scammed VoIP providers into thinking their telephone numbers are being utilized by an end-user, where in reality Mr. Allahwala is reselling those services without bothering to inform the provider(s) of the actual usage situation - which depending on the laws and regulations can very much matter who is in fact liable, but I am not a lawyer.
On numerous occasions in the past, I have found NuFone telephone numbers listed within his DIDx system, without our permission. As CTO of NuFone Inc., over the years I have repeatedly informed Mr. Allahwala that if he intends to resell our services, he needs to enter into a reseller agreement, which to this date has never been executed by Mr. Allahwala or anyone else at DIDx for that matter.
NuFone is not the only VoIP provider that Mr. Allahwala has targeted to acquire telephone numbers for his so-called DID exchange service. Mr. Allahwala has also been abusing quite a few other VoIP Providers and friendly CLECs that happen to support SIP. Since I provide consulting services to many others in the VoIP/Asterisk industry, I have been able to point out that I have noticed their telephone numbers were listed on DIDx. More often than not many immediately took action to remove their illegally resold services down — granted a few stated they had setup a specific relationship with DIDx.
DIDx is nothing more than a poorly crafted website and a service that is only very trivially based on Asterisk. In fact, according to a quick sip trace of a DIDx number that I have access to, the SIP User Agent is reported to be OpenSER — for whatever that’s worth.
As quick google shows, Mr. Allahwala’s has very much utilized (abused?) the various Asterisk mailing lists to promote his various VoIP service offerings, including DIDx, even after being asked to take his promotions to the proper list he still finds ways to get a word in and a link to his services.
WTF Digium? Did nobody else apply for your Awards?
I personally made the decision not to submit NuFone, because I felt it is not truly innovative or unique with our usage of Asterisk. Perhaps NuFone being the first commercial IAX provider has some merit, but I felt it wasn’t enough to justify applying.
Here is who I would pick for the most innovative Asterisk deployments in two of the categories:
Pioneer Award: Most innovative implementation — Adhearsion by Jay Phillips. In case you don’t know, Adhearsion is a Web 2.0 style framework for Asterisk. If you have not seen it, go check it out. While Adhearsion may not be exactly what Digium was thinking, since Adhearsion is a framework that is used to build a specific application implementation. However, I believe Adhearsion has just found the very tip of the iceberg when it comes to managing and scaling an Asterisk-based telephony application.
Notice I did not say an ‘asterisk box’, since in the real world there will be many instances of Asterisk that need to work in federation to provide an application that scales and is redundant. To effectively pull off a distributed ‘telephony application’ one needs a middleware application of some kind (glue) to help manage each particular component in the system. Adhearsion has gone a long way to provide the necessary framework. I will stop at that, this very could be another series of articles on managing distributed asterisk-based applications, not just ‘boxes’…
Inside Out Award: Best use of Asterisk in a business outside of telecommunications — app_rpt by Jim Dixon, DUDE! (et al.) The concept of leveraging Asterisk as a Repeater controller is totally outside the box. While radio may still be considered ‘telecommunication’ and I am unsure if Mr. Dixon has a ‘business’ behind this, I still feel app_rpt is far enough from the traditional PBX design of Asterisk that it is truly worthy of award and celebration.
As for the other two categories, I cannot make a reasonable choice, since this whole award concept by Digium is flawed. The act of taking applications for an award seems very contrived to me. I think the Asterisk community itself should have been asked to nominate those they they feel were worthy of recognition, from there the recipients could have been decided upon by Digium and perhaps the Asterisk Advisory Council [full disclosure: I am a member of the Advisory Council]
That is just my opinion, I could be wrong……….
If you would like to get the word out about Mr. Allahwalla and his operation, please Digg This Story. All consumers have a right to know who they are doing business with.
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Maybe that Mr. Allahwala paid the committee a fee for that award?
If this is actually true it doesn’t look good on Digium. I hope that there is some mistake here. Have you contacted Digium regarding this? I don’t see this anywhere on their site.
n1ck: Digium says they will be announcing the winners this week. Mr. Allahwala wasn’t suppose to announce it himself.
It seems you are jealous by his success
To be very honest, I have visited their website and had some good experience with them.
I have heard that they were selected as Finalist for World Communication Awards as well.
How ever; I think Digium Award worth going to them…
Regards,
SandPearl
Sanpearl, awards for businesses are nothing more than business/marketing agreements in disguise.
I am very much providing my own personal experience for the world to take or leave.
I really don’t care, really.
What I do care about are those elements that we would be held liable for if put into specific circumstances regarding various alphabet soup types *ahem* DHS. ’nuff said.
I guess an award is for appreciation not a business marketing agreement, like for e.g. Jeff P. earned many awards but that does not mean he is having any secret deal with that particular company.
Many companies it’s just the agreement?
Digium and DIDX are professional people, buddy.. not sure why your experience was bad with DIDX.. but God KNOWS ..
Well Jeremy; I am being proposed a very good deal from them and happy to use them. Just a comment.. nothing personal
Great. I am not in the ‘good deal’ business, so this is absolutely not personal.
Jeremy, this is so biased. I happen to be an integrator in Russia, using didx a lot, and I personally think the thing rocks.
* “website poorly crafted”
The site does the job. There are no design requirements for the DID routing to happen. We’re not a bunch of gay web2.0 freaks with macs. We’re integrators. When you pick up a phone off your SPA/Linksys with a number from didx, DO YOU EVEN CARE HOW WELL IS THE SITE CRAFTED, YO? You’re not making sense.
* “very trivially based on Asterisk”
I will send you a playstation and some Russian mail order brides for free if you provide THREE - actually, make that TWO - factual aspects that make working with Asterisk-based system for mass DID routing a bad choice; or even an slight nag for that matter. If the quality is otherwise excellent… do I give a damn about trivial Asterisk-based architecture? OMG, I got a call from my corp client this morning up in Venezuela, they had to stop using all their UK and Spain did numbers, because OMG, Jeremy just said your underlying technology is very trvially based on Asterisk, WTF, we can’t use those DIDs, ay, ay!
* “SIP User Agent is reported to be OpenSER”
Oh, and guess what? Jeff Pulver was in Moscow for VON Russia 2006. When asked “what do you use for your SIP farm”, he gave the following answer: “It’s basically a bunch of Asterisks with some SER in front of it”. Now, would you please expand on why having a SER-based farm of SIP servers is a bad thing? Please provide technical arguments. Also, don’t forget to accuse FWD of the same, here’s a good URL tip: /2007/10/25/wtf-jeff-running-fwd-service-on-asterisk-and-ser-omg-wtf/
There are literaly hundreds of people all over the globe who would never have the access to overseas numbers if not for DIDX. You totally miss the point. It’s like accusing Paypal of scamming just because your passwords were stolen by a misbehaving participants. Yeah, righ, WTF ebay, awarding investments to a scammer. OMG. WTF.
The logic is just not there.
Kev: You are missing my point completely.
Digium’s awards were specifically stated for innovative usage of Asterisk. What is so innovative, with regards to Asterisk, about providing DID service from a bunch of other carriers? and then using SER to do most of the work?
If you have not noticed, I am very much an OpenSER and Asterisk advocate, user and developer.
OK; I was about to throw some light on ‘good deal’ but I really like what Kev says… so.. best of luck
Ya know, I think I now understand why my 10 DIDs from DIDx simply stopped working one day. DIDx refused to provide me with a reason other than “technical difficulties.”
When I complained a second and third time the only response they had was to buy another 10 DIDs and they would waive the first month fee. Yeah right.
I am very glad I took my business elsewhere when I did.
Jeremy, thank you for telling it like it is. The world needs more people like you.
DIDx is very much a scam in my book, for sure.
Flip, when did your DIDs stop working? I lost 5 numbers about a year ago, early October 2006. I was woke up by a very pissed off customer saying all of his numbers had been disconnected.
DIDx kept telling us it was a temporary outage that was outside of their control. Needless to say we never did get those numbers back and we lost that customer.
My numbers went down in Feb this year. It is good to know that I am not the only person that had these same problems with DIDx. I won’t be buying any more numbers from them.
I am posting this to clear up the slander against DIDx. Our company has been very satisfied with the offerings of this very solid and capable organization. DIDx offers a quality service that enables VoIP businesses to prosper from the ability to provision customers from all over the world. The online process works well and the customer support is first rate. We would advise any forward thinking company to sign up and test the service for themselves. We are happy to recommend DIDx them based on our experiences. The negative statement regarding their well deserved commendation is seriously misplaced. They are very well connected in the VoIP world and have earned their kudos. Let the facts speak for themselves. Good luck DIDx.
We sell over 7,500 surplus DIDs through DIDx with no issues. It’s a great way for us to also reach lower volume resellers with whom it does not make sense for us to work directly.
As to innovation, I haven’t seen anyone else doing what they are doing. So what if it’s resale. Where else can you go and purchase DIDs from multiple providers in low volumes with no commitments?
As to numbers stopping working, my money is on the underlying carrier going out of business. That’s not something in DIDx’s control. If they offered to replace them and give you a free month of service, what more can you ask.
M. Cooper: Your comment here is an obvious attempt to make DIDx look far better than a simple google search shows.
Chris: Please…If a carrier/provider went out of business surely those dead numbers could be ported, but who is going to facilitate that for the DIDx customer? The DIDx customer is not a customer of the underlying carrier/provider that went out of business….thus nobody can produce the proper documentation to port the number, which leaves the poor DIDx customer without any possible way to restore service to his telephone numbers.
I’m sure you would very gladly give up your home phone number without notice or cause for a brand new one, right?
I agree with jj here. If for any reason a DIDx number goes down or ceases to work for any reason, DIDx is completely powerless. The only thing they can do is submit a trouble ticket and hope to get a response.
I do not see the innovation. Looks like a big bait and switch game to me.