[asterisk-biz] Anyone recommend a good VOIP provider?

[Jean-Michel Hiver]

Mark Phillips a écrit :

> Hi Folks,
>
> A new Asterisk customer of mine showed me his phone bill yesterday. 
> For 17 analogue cirsuits hes paying over $750 a month. From what I can 
> see a little over $500 of that is in line charges and taxes with the 
> remainder being in actual call charges.

How much would a partial PRI cost?

> We already know that he's top heavy on phone lines (he only has 10 
> employees) and so we are addressing that but I've started giving some 
> thought to a VOIP provider rather than stick with his analogue.
>
> In your opinion, would the migration to a VOIP provider save him 
> money? Could his 3 office phone numbers (one's an 800) be ported to 
> the provider? Which provider should I look at? I'd rather one that can 
> do IAX2.

Unless you have rock-solid connectivity between your VoIP provider and 
yourself, porting DIDs is asking for trouble. If you do this, use a 
local VoIP provider and ask to see the installations and emergency 
procedures in case of faulty hardware for instance.

Otherwise, I would recommend switching to a partial PRI (i.e. 10 
channels only) for inbound traffic, mainly because of reliability 
issues. Then for outbound, subscribe with 4-5 providers and use my "baby 
lcr" Asterisk::LCR [1] to do outbound dialing. Always use the PRI as 
fallback and for 911 service.

Also do not forget to have solid bandwith and do some traffic shaping. 
There are a few scripts which do that on the wiki.

[1] http://ykoz.net/intl/lcr/

Cheers,
Jean-Michel.

-- 
Jean-Michel Hiver - http://ykoz.net/
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