Services - Award Consulting

We offer a variety of specialized services to help service providers in the following key areas.

Metaswitch Support
If you need a Metaswitch expert on your team, we can work alongside your techs as mentors to help troubleshoot issues and implement changes.

Network Migrations & Changes
If you need new trunks, updated translations, or are migrating to a new switch, rest assured that we can handle this process for you. We’ve done it before.

Product Launch
If you want to offer new products (such as Hosted PBX, SIP trunking, or a new portal) to your customers, we can help configure a lab and develop your MOPs.

Network Maintenance & Security
If you need an audit, need advice on EOLs, or are worried about the risk of toll-fraud, we can help get your network running smoothly.

Metaswitch Support

We offer an expert retainer service, where we provide our clients a high-touch, responsive support service so they can get the benefits of having a true Metaswitch & VoIP expert on their team when they need it most.

For these services we will work alongside your own CO techs and the Metaswitch customer care engineers to ensure that any questions are answered quickly and any problems are fully resolved.

Read more about our Metaswitch Support Retainers here.

We can also provide training and mentorship to junior technicians if desired.

“We would recommend you to anyone needing Metaswitch help. And we would advise them to use your services sooner than later.”
Tim Burris
Manager of Technologies and Business Development, RTC Communications

Network Migrations and Changes

If you’re planning a significant change to your network – whether connecting to a new tandem, migrating to a new switch, or expanding your geographic footprint – we offer a variety of migration planning and implementation services to help make sure you’re on the right path.

Plan the migration: We’ll review your proposed network changes, discuss alternate options, and help you to make an informed decision about the best path to take in full knowledge of the various trade-offs.
Project Guidance: This is an advisory service where we’ll walk with you throughout the migration process – asking questions and offering advice to make sure the team makes good decisions throughout.
Translations: If you need to add a new rate center, or overhaul your entire translations logic, you’ll find that we are some of those weird people who actively enjoy playing with switch translations, and so we’d be happy to implement the changes. We also offer a LERG Update service so you can keep up to date with new number blocks as they are added.
New network trunks: If you need to move to a new tandem, or turn up some new trunks, we can add the new configuration to your Metaswitch and test the trunks before you add live traffic.
PSTN migration: If you’re migrating service onto a new switch we can swing the SS7 links and trunks, using point-code proxy (or sharing) functionality if appropriate for the situation.
VMware configuration: If you’re deploying virtual machines for the first time we can help walk you through the process and verify that you have all the VMware configuration correct for your Metaswitch products.

Over the years, its been glaringly obvious to me that you are the guy we should be dealing with when talking about complex switching matters.
Dean Bahls
Network Services Manager – Cooperative Networks Services, LLC

Product Launches – including Hosted PBX

If you’re ready to grow your business by offering hosted PBX (aka UCaaS) service to your business customers, we have a suite of services available to help you every step of the way – starting with a free consultation, auditing your system, setting up a working lab, supporting your team in the first customer deployments, and then helping you build out a scalable operation.

We can also assist if you plan to expand your product offerings in other ways, such as SIP trunking, or if you want to interop test and develop an endpoint pack for a new SIP phone.

Learn how we can help you with Hosted PBX

Andrew provided a lot of knowledge that we were missing. From the beginning he asked questions about the project that we would never have thought about, and those helped us immensely. His support provided comfort in getting us through the project.Steve Starr
Director of Network Operations, DayStarr Communications

Network Maintenance and Security

We want to make sure you can sleep at night, confident that your network is running smoothly and securely.

Security MOPs: Metaswitch publish a long list of MOPs to implement their security best practices – which are intended to (a) prevent hackers from accessing your network, (b) limit the damage even if they find a security hole, and (c) spot the breach if it happens so you can shut it down again. We have a service where we can implement these MOPs for you to reduce the risk of toll-fraud.
System Audit: everyone once in a while, it’s a good idea to have your Metaswitch system checked over to make sure everything’s running well. We’ll check for concerning alarms, check your network trunking capacity, review your hardware for any end-of-life concerns and recommend software upgrades where appropriate.
LERG Updates: We offer an ongoing LERG update service for Metaswitch translations where we can keep your translations up to date with all the new number and routing updates included in the LERG Routing database. Learn more here.
Trouble Ticket Czar: based on the ideas in ‘Why Oh Why do you have so many trouble tickets‘, we can provide a trouble ticket review, training session and ongoing 5 Whys Czar service to help guide your team to resolve persistent network issues that are straining your operations and reducing your quality.

“Andrew … understands the people aspect of our business and is very skilled in coming along side our existing staff and raising their skill level.”
Ray Napoletano
Vice President of Sales, Saddleback Communcations / Reinvent Telecom

Metaswitch Hardware

While our main business is providing technical expertise to our clients, we are beginning to put together a small stock of used Metaswitch hardware, for the convenience of our clients.

See our selection of Metaswitch Hardware

“The expertise and guidance that you and your team provided proved to be critical in getting the initial momentum and breaking through the various roadblocks that came up.”
Mike Holleran
Director of Product Management, IDI Billing Solutions