[Asterisk-biz] looking for trusted voip provider

[trixter aka Bret McDanel]

On Sat, 2005-12-24 at 19:07 -0500, Robert Wolpov wrote:
> The funny thing is we have MANY former VOIPJET customers amongst our large
> enterprise customer base that are thrilled they made the switch. I have
> spoken to them myself and I know they have a very different story to tell
> about our reliability, quality and professional service. 
> 

a side note about quality, this is not about any specific provider, some
do the good things I talk about here, some dont - I just wanted to say
this because it is part of determining a 'quality' provider.

Quality isnt always the provider themselves (although there are things
they can do to improve it from a specific customer perspective).  The
network route between the customer and the ITSP is something that
shouldnt be overlooked.  Far too often people advertise their service
but dont provide the server hostnames/IPs that will be handling the
calls.  As such a customer cant guage 'quality' in most cases.  Some
provide free accounts with a small amount of credit to test out the
service, and those companies should be commended (for the ones that do
not want to offer any free calling there should at least be a test
number that is internal to the ITSP for testing - perhaps an echo server
so the customer can hear for themselves any issues with call quality).

Some ISPs have outright blocked voip traffic, others are investing in
devices to cause jitter so bad that the call is largely useless.  Ping
times wont show this as the devices are set up to only do this to VoIP
traffic that isnt from the service that the ISP sells (or gets a
commission for).

In a global marketplace this is even more critical, there may be a
server that is local network-wise but to someone halfway around the
world that has to traverse 10-20 hops to get there it may be unusable.
Then there are places like where I live, there is 1 and only 1
non-dialup provider.  They have 1 and only 1 link to a tier 1 provider
(and they have no links to anyone else).  That provider has some pretty
bad routes to some places, as such most of the 'quality' providers are
hardly that from my network.  To some providers that are otherwise good
I have 200ms ping times to those servers.  

Just a thought on quality that seems often overlooked based on comments
people have made.  


-- 
Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com     Bret McDanel
UK +44 870 340 4605   Germany +49 801 777 555 3402
US +1 360 207 0479 or +1 516 687 5200
FreeWorldDialup: 635378
http://www.sacaug.org/ Sacramento Asterisk Users Group
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-biz/attachments/20051224/1f9dd6fc/attachment.pgp