[Asterisk-biz] Who uses only VOIP for their business? We do!

[smbPBX]

Michael:
I am delighted to know that your dogfood tastes so de-e-e-licious :)
May be I'll try some too!

And wow!
That's quite an endorsement of VoicePulse (99.999) - and even more for
NuFone!

I wish I could believe that DIDs from VoIP providers can be as reliable
(provided they stay in business that long). I would probably trust a CLEC
more for DIDs - they are at least regulated in the states they operate in.

While I am not quite sure of the 99.999% claim, I do agree with you that
integrating PSTN with Asterisk is equally troublesome - and not necessarily
lower cost. And, regarding your point about "end-to-end", the voice service
is indeed only one piece of the end-to-end service.

Finally, I am with you on the community making a commitment and demanding a
business class standard from the providers. I first signed up for Vonage
more than two years ago. After about 2 months, I literally cut the Verizon
PSTN wires in my basement - I had to make a commitment to make Vonage work
for me, at least at home.


I wish you continued good luck and success!!!

smbPBX

On 11/17/05, The VoIP Connection <asterisk-biz at thevoipconnection.com> wrote:
>
> I guess we must be lucky...
>
> We have been pure VoIP from Day #1 and plan to stay that way. The only
> reason the phone company knows we exist is because we have a yellow pages
> ad. It was fun explaining to the salesman why we didn't have a white pages
> listing! Our VoIP phone system was, in fact, the inspiraton for our
> current
> business.
>
> It hasn't always been smooth sailing, but we've learned a lot of lessons
> and
> solved a lot of problems because we had to. It's been worth it for us
> because it is what we do. As an old boss of mine used to say, "Eat your
> own
> dogfood". We have tried many providers and settled on a few. It's very
> easy
> to blame providers for all the problems and (gasp!) they do have them -
> but
> often the problem is much closer to home because a lot of things have to
> work right.
>
> We have used Voicepulse for at least two years and after factoring out all
> the issues that were not their fault, I would say their service has been
> at
> least 99.999% reliable. Nufone is even better. The quality degrades
> occasionally late in the afternoon, but we are still not sure where to lay
> the blame for that. We have many, many customers who love Vonage Business
> Plus. No, they aren't perfect, but they are pretty damn good. No, they
> aren't the cheapest either. You get what you pay for (usually). Let's face
> it, you can't pay .005 cents per minute and expect your provider to have
> great quality, 24/7 customer service, telco reliability AND stay in
> business.
>
> PSTN service is not exactly trouble free (with Asterisk anyway!). I could
> be
> wrong, but my gut feeling based on our customers and on the number of
> asterisk-users newsgroup postings is that the Asterisk community has just
> as
> much trouble making T1 and FXO setups work correctly (echo, dropped calls,
> clicks, pops, etc.) Sure, the service is (generally) more reliable but
> that's not the only piece of the puzzle when it comes to Asterisk, and
> that
> is what we are supposed to be discussing here.
>
> Our phone system is critical to our business. So is our power, and our
> shipper, and our ISP, and our dozen or so trusted suppliers. They all let
> us
> down on occasion, so we try to build as much redundancy and fault
> tolerance
> as we can into every aspect of our business (when you are based in Florida
> catastrophes are another day at the office). Even so, there is no
> substitute
> for having primary business systems that work the way they should.
>
> A T1 PRI is still the gold standard for voice service and there are
> certainly good reasons to advise against VoIP. We generally recommend that
> our customers keep at least one line of PSTN. Like all decisions of
> consequence, you have to weigh the risks and benefits. The single greatest
> thing about Asterisk is its ability to support all of the options. I do
> feel
> that the VoIP industry will never progress unless some of us commit to it,
> hold our providers to the standards that businesses expect, and are
> willing
> to pay a fair rate for what they offer.
>
> In response to the OP, you can put us in the "WIN" column.
>
> Michael Crown
> Managing Partner
> www.thevoipconnection.com <http://www.thevoipconnection.com>
> 321.989.6728 ext. 611
> sip:611 at voiceserver.thevoipconnection.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> Asterisk-Biz mailing list
> Asterisk-Biz at lists.digium.com
> http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz
>



--
Regards,

smbPBX
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