If you’re looking for a full soup-to-nuts classroom training experience, you’re not going to find a better alternative than the official Metaswitch training classes. These are multi-day, instructor-led training classes with lab exercises held regularly at various training centers around the world. At time of writing their were 14 different classes available in North America, covering topics such as Metaswitch System Overview, CFS Translations, Perimeta SBC or Hosted PBX Deployment and Troubleshooting.
Having said that, the official Metaswitch training classes aren’t always appropriate for your situation:
- sometimes the class you need isn’t scheduled in the near future
- sometimes you need a crash course in specific topics, and don’t have time to sit through weeks of classes to cover all the bases
- perhaps you prefer to learn on the job rather than through classroom training.
If you find yourself looking for an alternative to the official Metaswitch training options, then there are a few ways we can help you.
- You should definitely join our email list, as the articles on this website (and published to the list) cover a wide range of valuable topics.
- For on the job training, our expert retainer service allows a new/junior technician to quickly talk to our engineers by phone – so that we can act as mentors to help him/her get up to speed quickly.
- We don’t offer lengthy training courses, but if you needed a few hours of education on specific topics, or a mix of presentations, Q&A and hands-on demonstrations, we can create a custom training proposal for you.
- In October 2019 we hosted a virtual conference – a series of 5 webinars on topics chosen by attendees – and the video recordings from that conference are available for purchase below.
Metaswitch Training Webinars from the virtual conference
This video package consists of 5 webinars, each lasting 1 hour, originally presented live as part of our virtual conference VoIP and the Independent Telecom.
Here’s a little information about each of the webinars and the panelists who helped present each topic.
TDM, VoIP, virtualization and the future of the PSTN
Panelists:
Andrew Ward – Award Consulting
Ray Napoletano – VP Sales at Reinvent Telecom
Chris Wallace – Voice Architect at Education Networks of America
Vishal Sharma – Principal at Metanoia
Over the past 15-20 years we’ve seen large parts of the TDM-based PSTN replaced by VoIP. A generation of “softswitches” provide both TDM and VoIP functionality and act as gateways that allow voice calls to pass over both types of transport. In that time, much of the TDM access network has been replaced with VoIP, although we have more of a mixed-bag in terms of PSTN-connectivity, where most carriers have a mix of SIP trunks and ISUP trunks.
The last 5 years has seen the rise of virtualization, as the industry realized that specialist hardware was no longer needed to run a VoIP network, and moving our network functions into a virtual environment would provide greater flexibility, cost savings, and avoid the need for big capital purchases whenever a set of hardware reached the end of its useful life.
However many questions are still unanswered. In this webinar the panel discussed:
- What does it take to finally “cut the cord” from TDM-based network connectivity
- What benefits does virtualization promise, and are telcos currently receiving those benefits?
- Do we have to go down this path? What happens if we stick with what we have?
- What if a telco doesn’t have anyone with the skills to implement virtualization?
- Is there even any point in running our own switch any more? Can’t someone just host this all for us?
- Once we’ve set up a virtual infrastructure, what other services could we offer to our customers?
- What will the PSTN look like 15 years from now?
Voice Network Architecture – When does redundancy become redundant?
Panelists:
Andrew Ward – Award Consulting
Stephen Denny – Award Consulting
In this webinar we discussed redundancy, geo-redundancy, clustered CFS, distributed UMGs – and how a telco can figure out the best architecture for their situation.
Security: toll-fraud, robocalling and caller ID spoofing
Panelists:
Andrew Ward – Award Consulting
Brian Ford – Senior Regulatory Counsel at NTCA
Jim Dalton – CEO of TransNexus
This session covered two related-but-different topics:
- Toll-fraud – where a hacker hijacks one of your subscriber’s accounts for the purpose of making expensive calls for free
- Robocalling – where automated dialers call large numbers of people in quick succession and play a standardized message to each of them. Related to this is caller ID spoofing, which makes robocalling more dangerous and harder to stop.
We will discuss why and how people perform these attacks on your network, what you can do about it, and what the industry is doing about robocalling with STIR/SHAKEN.
Perimeta training – adjacencies, routing and MMFs
Panelists:
Andrew Ward – Award Consulting
This webinar is aimed at technicians who have a Perimeta Session Border Controller operational in their network but don’t have much experience changing the configuration.
Attendees gained a fuller understanding of the functions available on the SBC and will learn the basics of manipulating SIP headers using the Perimeta MMF functionality.
Making our hosted PBX product work better
Panelists:
Andrew Ward – Award Consulting
Rick Wagner – VP Operations and Engineering at Access One
Jake Livingstone – Senior VoIP Solutions Architect at Reinvent Telecom (and formerly part of the Metaswitch Training team)
In this webinar we mixed in some general discussion of Hosted PBX / UCaaS best practices with some practical advice on troubleshooting and provisioning.
If you’d like to purchase access to these 5 webinar recordings, you may do so below.
- Individual: Permanent access to the videos for one specific person. Purchase through PayPal for $99.
- Corporate: Permanent access to the videos for use by anyone at the same company. Purchase through PayPal for $250.
In either case, you will receive an email within 24 hours of your purchase providing a link to watch / download the videos.