[Asterisk-biz] Startup

[Race Vanderdecken]

Honestly?

Money.

You can't do it easily without about $2500-$5000. $10,000 makes it
simple. $25,000 and vendors will help you. Anything less then $15,000 in
cash and most vendors are not going to want to help you. Handholding is
expensive for vendors. They need to be able to make a profit. If you
have to arrange credit then they might be slow to help because they know
it takes time to get money for VoIP.

1. You need to educate yourself on PSTN termination costs and DID
numbers. 

2. Get a copy of Newton's Telecom Dictionary.

3. Create a business Plan. 
	What do you want to do with your business? Make money? 
	Are you going to sell calling cards or rent phones on a table in
a coffee shop?

4. Your comment about "Preferably one that can call PSTN phones " sounds
like you want to be a "minutes" carrier. That means you create put a
VoIP Gatekeeper and Gateway in an Area Code and sell access to that Area
Code / LATA (see the need for the Newton's Telecom dictionary yet?)

	Selling "minutes" means you contract with a guy in another area
code and the two of you agree to terminate calls to/from the PSTN for
each other. By Area Code I also mean different countries.

5. If you are running a coffee shop with phones so people can call back
to their motherland then you can use Asterisk to connect all the VoIP
phones to the internet. And use Asterisk to connect calls from other
Internet Countries to the PSTN.


You could do it without money, but then you would not make much. You
need computers, phones, gatekeepers, gateways, DID's, PRI's, T1's and
lots of things to move enough calls through the system to make any
money.

T1's cost about $600 a month, plus installation and equipment. That
would give you "24" telephone lines into your office that you can
compress into about 100 calls.

You can use a rack of Pentium 4's to do routing and the billing and the
databases. Use Linux and mysql (LAMP) and work from the bottom up for
about $2500.

Race "The Tyrant" Vanderdecken


-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-biz-bounces at lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-biz-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Kevin Taylor
Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 4:50 PM
To: Asterisk-Biz at lists.digium.com
Subject: [Asterisk-biz] Startup

Hello all,

I am relatively new to Voip.  I was wondering if anyone could point me 
in the right direction as to what is required to get a voip business up 
and running.  Perferablly one that can call ptsn phones.  This question 
is vague I know.  Thank you for your help.