Another vexation for VOIP in the SMB environment is that it rarely works particularly well (if at all) in light of a multiple-external-address NAT pool.
You simply have to map all of your VOIP phones in such a way that they consistently get the same external IP every time or shit breaks badly. Owen On Feb 28, 2011, at 11:11 AM, Bret Palsson wrote: > Since our company is a VoIP company, I will chime in to this topic. > > Let's start off with the definitions so everyone is on the same page: > > vex |veks| > verb [ trans. ] > make (someone) feel annoyed, frustrated, or worried, esp. with trivial > matters : the memory of the conversation still vexed him | [as adj. ] ( > vexing)the most vexing questions for policymakers.] > > Alright, now that that's out of the way... > > I am only referring to small medium business and some enterprise (Those are > all our customers, we do not do residential) > - Seemingly complex. > - Worried about the "What if the internet goes down" scenario. > - Call quality. > - Price > - Location > - Outages > > Responses: > - Seemingly complex... Very true. Most VoIP companies, both hosted and on > premises are difficult/time consuming to setup and make work they way you > want it. > - What if the internet goes down. This one is a challenge. POTS actually have > issues too, but when analog phone service goes down, there is no light on the > phone indicating that the phones are not working so many customers perceive > there is a problem. With the FCC mandating all POTS move to a VoIP backend > (which for long hauls, is mostly already true) POTS will experience the same > downtime as the internet. > However as we all know, the internet is built to tolerate outages. > For most people they don't understand how the internet actually works. > - Call quality... If a VoIP company pays for good bandwidth and maintains > good relationships with peers, the only concern is the last-mile(From the CO > to location). Now there is much more that plays in quality, ie. codec > selection, voice buffer, locality to the pbx. > - Price... Believe it or not people are worried about paying less for better > service. Who would have thought? > - Location... Location is super important both in the last mile and PBX. > - Last mile: > In older locations the copper in the ground is aged, if you > can't get fiber and your stuck using T1, lines, then hopefully you are in a > location that keeps the copper in the ground properly maintained. If you are > in older locations, which one of our offices are, there are remedies, you can > contact your bandwidth provider and have them do a head to head test using a > BERD (bit error rate detector) and they can find the problem. But that's a > whole other topic. > > -PBX: > Some people believe that on premise is the best location for a > PBX, this may or may not be true. I happen to believe that keeping it off > premise is the way to go. You get up-time, redundancy, locality, and > mobility. You just plug in your phone and your phone is up and running. Move > offices.. got bandwidth? Your good to go. No equipment to worry about, say a > power outage happens, your voicemail still works people call in and are in > call queues and have no clue you are down. Feels more like POTS with an > enterprise backend. > > -Outages: If the internet does fail, most providers offer WAN survivability. > The customer plugs in phone lines into the router and if the internet goes > down, they can make emergency calls or calls to the world limited by the > number of lines the router can accept and are plugged in of course. Now in > all our experience going on 7 years now, 90% of the time WAN outages happen, > guess what also dies, the POTS! Who would have thought that when cables get > cut, that the phone lines were also part of the cables? > > There you go, some common worries, with some answers to hopefully sooth the > vexed VoIP user. > > Bret Palsson > Sr. Network & Systems Administrator > www.getjive.com > > > On Feb 28, 2011, at 11:37 AM, valdis.kletni...@vt.edu wrote: > >> On Mon, 28 Feb 2011 13:29:08 EST, Bret Clark said: >>> On 02/28/2011 01:17 PM, Leigh Porter wrote: >>>> VoIP at the last mile is just too niche at the moment. It's for people on >>>> this list, not my mother. >> >>> Baloney...if that was the case, then all these ILEC's wouldn't be >>> whining about POT's lines decreasing exponentially year over year! >> >> I do believe that the ILEC's are mostly losing POTS lines to cell phones, not >> to VoIP. I myself have a cell phone but no POTS service at my home address. >> On >> the other hand, I *am* seeing a metric ton of Vonage and Magic Jack ads on TV >> these days - if VoIP is "too niche", how are those two making any money? >> >
