[asterisk-biz] Does VoIP Really Work for Serious Business?

[Mark]

I feel inclined to reply to this, so therefore I am replying

First, if you are talking about International Long distance problems of 
echos, and not connecting are fairly normal.

Secondly, If you are using the cut rate providers, well you get what you 
pay for. For instance I used to buy cheap toll free origination from a 
company whose name is well known (and slips my mind at the moment) for 2 
cents per minute. Unfortunately the provider they use is Global 
Crossing. Global Crossing's toll free sucks, not to mention that there 
is a scam on some Mexico Pay Phones that is the second reason I am 
boycotting Global crossing (Charging $75 US for a 10 minute collect call 
to the USA when the recipient is NOT a Global Crossing subscriber, and 
they quote lower when asked, as if every call will terminate to a Global 
Crossing subscriber!), although stickers say it is the cheapest way to 
call home! Most of the toll free I am now using I pay nearly twice the 
price for, however it is accessible from all 50 states as well as Canada 
and originates from Sprint. I have had exactly one outage that I am 
aware of in the last 8 months or so.

Thirdly, I may well be flamed for this next part, however PART of the 
problem MAY be Asterisk! Asterisk favors Native bridging unless 
explicitly forced to do otherwise. After having worked with a variety of 
media types over more thanb 25 years, I will say that less is best. In 
other words, why use Asterisk Native bridging when it may not be the 
highest quality call that you can deliver? There is really no reason in 
most cases to pass the media through an asterisk box, unless you need to 
transcode it.

Mark


Voip Xpress wrote:

> Discussion...is VoIP really ready for serious business use.
>
> We have been installing Asterisk for customers for about a year now, 
> and we are beginning to wonder if parts of VoIP are really ready for 
> serious business. Long Distance in particular is a problem.
>
> We use 3 LD providers, one a Tier 2 provider (ie buys from L3, Sprint 
> etc) and a couple of others lower down the food tree (that are often 
> discussed on this message board). We still find that almost all 
> customers complain about dropped calls, echo, dead connections from 
> time to time. My guess is that maybe 75-90% of calls are connected 
> with decent quality. The rest are problems for various reasons, and 
> customers are getting fed up with it.
>
> We have a primary carrier for each route based on quality and cost, 
> and fallback to another carrier if the call cannot be connected, but 
> we find invariably that carriers take calls and then dont connect them.
>
> We are at the point of stopping offering LD service. We make a few 
> c/min, but the customer disatisfaction is just not worth it. People 
> wont accept Skype quality 10-20% of the time. There is still a good 
> business case for customers to install VoIP within the enterprise, and 
> for Off premise users, but to save a few c/min on LD is not worth the 
> trouble. We have considered connecting customers up directly to a 
> carrier to cut out the connection through our own servers.
>
> We have also have mixed success with origination...busy signals, 
> missed calls and have stopped taking new users.
>
> So...are we alone. Is it possible to get VoIP LD to be as good as TDM 
> 95% of the time, and if so how? We dont have the time to try calls 
> with every carrier to every area code every day!
>
> (and please, no responses from VoIPjet, Voxee, Junction, broadvoice 
> etc etc saying how you are different. We know that you all suck to 
> varying degrees!)
>
> Help! VoipXpress
>
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