[asterisk-biz] RE: If money is not a considerationwho givesthebest SIP termination??

[Steve Totaro]

Jean-Michel Hiver wrote:
>
>> "ALMOST does not count except in horse shoes and hand grenades."  
>> Neither of which would I ever consider basing 12,000 call a day 
>> 5million minute/mo, multi-million dollar call center on.
>
> That's 13.8 minutes per call. Pretty good going for a call center! 
> It's probably tech support, I suspect mass phone marketing as a much 
> lower ACD than this =)
Yes, we do all inbound at the moment from direct response marketing, so 
they are inbound sales calls from interested customers.

We are soon going to offering a gift to our customers.  A 500 minute/mo 
calling card which will skyrocket our minute usage and DS3 trunks.  I 
really don't want this traffic on the DS3 feeding the call center and 
since it is a calling card, it costs twice (cost and channel) as much to 
terminate the call (trunk to trunk).

Is there anyone out there that offers hosted calling card apps with an 
API to tie into our business logic and databases?  The real motivation 
in seeking VoIP alternatives is the calling card service but if the 
savings prove significant all other things being equal, then the call 
center would logically follow.
>> Lets talk dollars and cents.  Quantify the cost part of "IP 
>> connections can be made much more fault tolerant than TDM connections 
>> at a much lower cost."  I understand the fault tolerance (but not so 
>> much in your no peering scenario).  Cost of what?  The cost of 
>> redundancy?  Are you including the costs of lost revenue, sales, an 
>> hour of downtime costing $25k?  Lets talk numbers since we both 
>> understand how the public internet works (or doesn't for realtime 
>> apps).  Neither my voice DS3 nor my multilink 3xT1s have ever gone 
>> down and have always provided PERFECT voice quality.
>
> Some gateways such as Quintum have the ability to automatically 
> failover PSTN when speech quality becomes unacceptable. That might be 
> what you're looking for... you'd still get some substantial savings by 
> doing LCR & using multiple VoIP providers (ibasis, vsnl, teleglobe...) 
> AND you would still get decent speech quality at all times.
Quintum makes AWESOME boxes.  We use several of the TenorAX models in 
our setup for station side stuff.  I am glad you mentioned this since I 
knew the feature sets of their other products but didn't put together 
the two as an option until you brought it up.  This may very well be the 
best avenue to explore.
>
> Mind you, with this kind of volume, you might be able to negotiate 
> pretty good deals over TDM anyways... it's what the VoIP players do: 
> collect traffic to try and build volume so they can get better deals. 
> Since you already have the volume (okay, 5MM is tiny in the grand 
> scheme of things, but still pretty good going), and don't have a 
> multi-site setup, VoIP might be lots of migration work and get you 
> little in return.
We have a pretty decent rate right now, I am just fishing and exploring 
other options but I do not really see the savings vs risk realized.  
Fractions of pennies add up quickly on this scale but potential lost 
revenue adds up quicker.  VoIP migration would free up a great deal of 
servers for other tasks and be fairly trivial since we are running a 
heavily modified version of Asterisk.
>
> And if it's a multimillion dollar operation, it's not like you can toy 
> around with it too much either...
I definitely agree with that but with the holy grail of Asterisk, some 
toying is possible while mitigating the risks if done correctly.
>
> Cheers,
> Jean-Michel.
>
Thanks,
Steve Totaro