Michael:<br>
I am delighted to know that your dogfood tastes so de-e-e-licious :)<br>
May be I'll try some too!<br>
<br>
And wow!<br>
That's quite an endorsement of VoicePulse (99.999) - and even more for NuFone!<br>
<br>
I wish I could believe that DIDs from VoIP providers can be as reliable
(provided they stay in business that long). I would probably trust a
CLEC more for DIDs - they are at least regulated in the states they
operate in.<br>
<br>
While I am not quite sure of the 99.999% claim, I do agree with you
that integrating PSTN with Asterisk is equally troublesome - and not
necessarily lower cost. And, regarding your point about "end-to-end",
the voice service is indeed only one piece of the end-to-end
service.<br>
<br>
Finally, I am with you on the community making a commitment and
demanding a business class standard from the providers. I first signed
up for Vonage more than two years ago. After about 2 months, I
literally cut the Verizon PSTN wires in my basement - I had to make a
commitment to make Vonage work for me, at least at home.<br>
<br>
<br>
I wish you continued good luck and success!!!<br>
<br>
smbPBX<br>
<br>
<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 11/17/05, <b class="gmail_sendername">The VoIP Connection</b> <<a href="mailto:asterisk-biz@thevoipconnection.com">asterisk-biz@thevoipconnection.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
I guess we must be lucky...<br><br>We have been pure VoIP from Day #1 and plan to stay that way. The only<br>reason the phone company knows we exist is because we have a yellow pages<br>ad. It was fun explaining to the salesman why we didn't have a white pages
<br>listing! Our VoIP phone system was, in fact, the inspiraton for our current<br>business.<br><br>It hasn't always been smooth sailing, but we've learned a lot of lessons and<br>solved a lot of problems because we had to. It's been worth it for us
<br>because it is what we do. As an old boss of mine used to say, "Eat your own<br>dogfood". We have tried many providers and settled on a few. It's very easy<br>to blame providers for all the problems and (gasp!) they do have them - but
<br>often the problem is much closer to home because a lot of things have to<br>work right.<br><br>We have used Voicepulse for at least two years and after factoring out all<br>the issues that were not their fault, I would say their service has been at
<br>least 99.999% reliable. Nufone is even better. The quality degrades<br>occasionally late in the afternoon, but we are still not sure where to lay<br>the blame for that. We have many, many customers who love Vonage Business
<br>Plus. No, they aren't perfect, but they are pretty damn good. No, they<br>aren't the cheapest either. You get what you pay for (usually). Let's face<br>it, you can't pay .005 cents per minute and expect your provider to have
<br>great quality, 24/7 customer service, telco reliability AND stay in<br>business.<br><br>PSTN service is not exactly trouble free (with Asterisk anyway!). I could be<br>wrong, but my gut feeling based on our customers and on the number of
<br>asterisk-users newsgroup postings is that the Asterisk community has just as<br>much trouble making T1 and FXO setups work correctly (echo, dropped calls,<br>clicks, pops, etc.) Sure, the service is (generally) more reliable but
<br>that's not the only piece of the puzzle when it comes to Asterisk, and that<br>is what we are supposed to be discussing here.<br><br>Our phone system is critical to our business. So is our power, and our<br>shipper, and our ISP, and our dozen or so trusted suppliers. They all let us
<br>down on occasion, so we try to build as much redundancy and fault tolerance<br>as we can into every aspect of our business (when you are based in Florida<br>catastrophes are another day at the office). Even so, there is no substitute
<br>for having primary business systems that work the way they should.<br><br>A T1 PRI is still the gold standard for voice service and there are<br>certainly good reasons to advise against VoIP. We generally recommend that
<br>our customers keep at least one line of PSTN. Like all decisions of<br>consequence, you have to weigh the risks and benefits. The single greatest<br>thing about Asterisk is its ability to support all of the options. I do feel
<br>that the VoIP industry will never progress unless some of us commit to it,<br>hold our providers to the standards that businesses expect, and are willing<br>to pay a fair rate for what they offer.<br><br>In response to the OP, you can put us in the "WIN" column.
<br><br>Michael Crown<br>Managing Partner<br><a href="http://www.thevoipconnection.com">www.thevoipconnection.com</a><br>321.989.6728 ext. 611<br><a href="mailto:sip:611@voiceserver.thevoipconnection.com">sip:611@voiceserver.thevoipconnection.com
</a><br><br>_______________________________________________<br>Asterisk-Biz mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Asterisk-Biz@lists.digium.com">Asterisk-Biz@lists.digium.com</a><br><a href="http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz">
http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz</a><br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Regards,<br><br>smbPBX<br>