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

[John Bittner]

I think VoIP will be ready for serious business use only if the voip
provider can control the whole path of the call before it hits the PSTN.

For us we spent the last year getting our network ready to deploy voip. Like
everyone else we started out thinking big and tested everyone's
(Level3,XO,DCI) voip products. We found out very quickly that there service
quality and reliability was not going to work for our business customers.
 
We decided to stay local and sell in areas that we can hand off direct
connections (T1's) or SDSL to our customers allowing us to control the QOS.
Instead of taking voip trunks from the carriers we switched to TDM. Since we
now do the TDM to voip conversions we have diverse redundancy and can
control a lot more aspects of the calls then we could buying voip trunks. 

John Bittner
Director
Simlab.net



 


-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-biz-bounces at lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-biz-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Steve Totaro
Sent: Tuesday, March 07, 2006 3:22 PM
To: Commercial and Business-Oriented Asterisk Discussion
Subject: RE: [asterisk-biz] Does VoIP Really Work for Serious Business?

This is a great and honest email.  I am looking forward to the replies.

My thoughts are VoIP is ready for serious business on the LAN and point to
point links.

Thanks,
Steve Totaro

> 
> 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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