[asterisk-biz] VoIP Provider

[Miles Scruggs]

On Jun 24, 2008, at 8:56 AM, Steve Totaro wrote:

> Responses inline
>
> On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 9:56 AM, Miles Scruggs  
> <asterisk at wideideas.com> wrote:
>> I think there are some serious irrational fears about the public
>> internet and misconceptions.  In my opinion the only time you run  
>> into
>> public internet problems is either last mile or poor planning.
>
> Opinion, exactly...  I am going to actually test with automated tools.

What would be really cool if you posted your results, and the  
infrastructure you used to test it with (networks, providers, transit,  
hardware etc).  Really this information is only useful if it fails  
because if it turns out your findings are that public internet is  
better then all you have is a single case of it working nothing really  
objective at all.

>
>
>> The
>> internet is like voice in that you can have multiple termination, but
>> it gets better because you can also have multiple origination
>> providers as well.  So basically as long as you are buying high
>> quality transit from multiple providers and you are located in a good
>> data-center the chances you will experience problems is lower than if
>> you are using private links because those represent single points of
>> failure.
>
> You completely disregarded the very simple fact that you can have
> multiple private links.  Not sure why you omitted that obvious fact.
> You seem to know what you are talking about so the omission seems odd.

First for the most part I don't know what I'm talking about I just  
know what works for us.  Simply trying to combat the general miss  
conception that voice over public internet can't be high quality or  
reliable.

Well there a couple reasons I didn't mention (main one was I didn't  
really think of it, even though I know they exist):

1.)	They tend to (not always) terminate to the same piece of hardware  
(same card in the switch etc) in the carrier location or at multiple  
points along the path. (When PRIs fail it is rarely because someone  
cut a single wire, or it is only effecting a single circuit)
2.)	The path in general is still a single path/carrier even when it  
does get consolidated into a larger trunk closer to the carrier's core  
(yes a little redundant of #1)

>
>
>>
>> I just ran into this with AT&T they currently only provide  
>> origination
>> (for national did market access) over private t1 or DS3 circuits.  If
>> we had went with them they would have been our most unreliable route
>> because they weren't over the public internet.  We have yet to have a
>> public internet related issue with any major provider, and AT&T seems
>> to be the last player in the market to get it (they do provide
>> termination only over public internet btw just not origination yet).
>> I'm still a little burnt about the whole AT&T deal since they will  
>> not
>> provide the service over ethernet, when we are literally 20 feet away
>> from their cross connects, they want to build out a full DS3 with a
>> managed router, but alas that is a story for another day.
>
> I see no less reliability, you are getting a T1 or T3 (naming
> conventions should be standard, so DS3 should be referred to as a T3)
> from the carrier, point to point that terminates into their network.
> How is that different as far as reliability than any other T1 or T3
> other than it stays on network?  Seems much more reliable than public
> net.

When you have 4+ transit providers via the public internet over  
multiple redundant links already existing in the infrastructure that  
would be significantly more redundant (I was going to say reliable,  
but that isn't always the case and I recognize that. for us it is  
though) than a single private link.  As Bret pointed out this does  
require it to exist at both end, in this case I stepped out on a limb  
and assumed that AT&T would have access to multiple paths of transit,  
and we moved our stuff out my mom's place over to my friends place who  
lives closer to the city and we can get a backup DSL connection last  
week.  :)

All I'm saying is you definitely can provide voice over IP over the  
public internet effectively and reliably.  It would be very difficult  
to do it with a single or multiple T1s to a remote location (it would  
just be a matter of time/luck), but if you can centralize yourself in  
a location with great access to IP transit it isn't hard.  It isn't a  
simple as saying that PRIs are more reliable/better quality.

The reason we choose IP carrier termination over the public internet  
instead of PRIs is that we could build out infrastructure that wasn't  
centralized around a single carrier.  With an infrastructure based on  
the public internet it gives us great flexibility, to work with a wide  
range of carriers and scale in a much more flexible fashion while not  
sacrificing quality or reliability.