Lumen Next-Gen Voice vs. Rakuten Viber

CenturyLink SIP is an acceptable solution if you have an on-prem PBX (ShoreTel, Mitel, etc) that accepts SIP. I have found a better solution is to run two different carriers through SD-WAN (such as Bigleaf or Velocloud MSR) and use a provider like BCMOne (formerly NexVortex) to manage the SIP.

Incentivized

As mentioned previously, it is easy to use and access since the you can chat, send voice memos or stickers in a conversation. So in overall it's very entertaining. But throughout that, the audio quality can seem to be a bit off. (Could be personal headset issue) Overall that is the only issue that is present or consistent.

Incentivized

• Reliable service
• Supports wide range of key features
• They do have high levels of support where you can receive real answers

Incentivized

• Viber is a cross platform product. It does not matter if someone uses Android or iOS device, it will work exactly the same.
• Also the desktop version is very good. You can switch between the desktop and mobile versions within a conversation and see updates right away.
• It's a very international product. It has been available for very long time, which makes it very wide spread - it has a good user base.
• You can see the status of your messages.

Incentivized

• Lumen-Centurylink has suffered from many noticeable outages in the last few years - this is a blow to their reputation that they still have to recover from.
• Lumen-CenturyLink does not peer well enough with OTHER carriers - they depend on their own network to give you SIP, which means less true redundancy.
• Lumen-CenturyLink needs a better customer portal/interface to handle failover, see the real-time status, etc.

Incentivized

• When someone sends a file in Viber, the program automatically saves it in your phone memory. This means that you must delete them manually and it really annoys me, as it takes a lot of time to do that.
• It contains enormous amounts of adds.
• There is file sharing limit.

Incentivized

SIP service support is definitely improving. A few years ago I would have rated them a 2. Now a 7. But, Lumen still needs a better portal experience to report and see a real-time status. Also to manage SIP failover functions in a WYSIWIG/GUI interface. When Lumen's network breaks in a larger outage, there are long hold times and support is not good.

Incentivized

I have not frequently used the support for Viber as I have not had many problems with it on my phone. I did use support one time for problems with the computer application and used the forums to solve my problems. They were fairly easy to follow and I appreciated the online help in that format.

Incentivized

CenturyLink [Enterprise Voice SIP] was the incumbent, so switching providers, particularly for our HQ was an overwhelming task for our small team. We did migrate from the legacy CenturyLink voice product EIPT to the new Voice Complete solution as well as upgrade our US and UK circuits along with a hardware upgrade of the managed PE routers in each location. We also decided to implement RingCentral in one of our very small international branches but the lack of features is problematic. We still have T1 service in our other international branches but are looking to go full cloud SaaS PBX there, likely through Microsoft Teams, which we already use for messaging. There are some complexities, as we can't port our numbers directly yet and need to set up an additional CUBE router for SIP. Eventually we hope to get to fully SaaS via Teams.

Incentivized

End-to-end encryption scrambles my messages and delivers them as a scrambled code to my friend's device, whether mobile or desktop, so that only their device can decode them into plain text. If my friend's phone is turned off or they don't have access to the internet, my message will be stored on Viber's servers (for a limited time) until their device is ready to receive it.

Because Viber can't access or read my private conversations in the first place, Viber can't sell them.

Incentivized

• Faster learning
• Increased numbers of calls
• Organization of calls

Incentivized

• Viber saves me financially since I am now able to communicate with my international clients for free.
• Viber helps keep my clients engaged by the fact that I can so easily share photos, which is important as a freelance photographer.
• Viber allows me to make my messages to clients appealing in a visual way, which I have noticed helps drive actions of my clients, such as remembering to book their next session or pay for their photo order.

Incentivized