[Asterisk-biz] LiveVoip Multi Channel PBX City Plan

[alex at pilosoft.com]

On Wed, 27 Apr 2005, Preston Garrison wrote:

> For starters you can get a new customer to sign a contract if thats a
> concern.  But how hard is it to sign a level3 contract, and put up some
> SER servers?  If your just acting as a proxy, you don't even use
> bandwidth, and that server can handle thousands of connections.
For one, L3 will not deal with you unless you bring 10k$/mo. Additionally, 
you still end up paying for concurrent channels, even if it is all VoIP.

> I love VOIP, because it costs hardly any hard costs to deploy service.  
> There is no better business when it comes to hard costs.
It is only 'hardly any hard costs' if 

a) you are not using proper equipment, and ghetto-rigging asterisk into
every solution.

b) your time is worth nothing

When you play with the big dogs in tall grass, you quickly notice that 
real softswitches and SBC's cost money, feature servers cost money, etc.

Note: I'm not dissing asterisk. Asterisk has its place. However, to
understand how to build a decent Asterisk-based solution, one needs to
have lots of clue. That clue is not free to hire (and if you are the one
with clue, while you don't have to pay yourself anything, you have to
consider the opportunity cost - money you would make consulting if you
weren't stuck trying to use Asterisk). 

In other words, with Asterisk, clue can substitute for some (not all!) of
the hard costs. However, keep in mind that clue is not free.

-alex