[asterisk-users] VOIP Bandwidth questions

[mail-lists]

Hello everyone,

This probably isn't the correct place to ask this but I thought I'd 
check here first.

We're getting ready to roll out a hosted pbx solution on  a very limited 
trial basis (some company employees are going to get voip service at 
home). Our main issue is of course bandwidth. We have enough bandwidth 
(spread across two locations) to accommodate the few employees (around 
10) for the near future but we're worried about how this is going to 
scale. Obviously at some point we'll need to consider 'real' bandwidth.

My question is this: How do huge voip companies like vonage handle 
bandwidth. I'm pretty sure that they have to have sufficient bandwidth 
available for X numbers of simultaneous calls, in other words ALL VOIP 
traffic runs through their servers, right? My boss is of the mind that 
there is no way that this is a viable business model and his insistence 
has me doubting myself.

So, to clarify - Vonage has to have the necessary bandwidth to handle 
whatever amount of simultaneous calls. I can imagine that one vonage 
user calling another vonage user would use some sort of sip re-invite 
and perhaps even calls to other huge providers (packet8) are direct 
client to client. (Last time I read about this it seems that even calls 
to other large voip providers go through the PSTN  though). Barring voip 
to voip calls, everything must run through their bandwidth right?

If I'm right on this, I guess we need to come up with some sort of 
viable business model to do sell our own service. I want to concentrate 
on smb clients to whom we can then provide an asterisk box which would 
leave our bandwidth free, but my boss isn't particularly keen on this 
route.


Anyways,

Thanks for any insight and advice on this question, sorry if I'm asking 
this in the wrong place


Thanks,

Steve