[Asterisk-biz] Startup

[Colin Anderson]

Horribly vague. You have to have some idea of the product you want to offer
to your endusers. This will dictate your needs. Some questions you want to
ask yourself:

-Do you want to sell your own homegrown solution or do you want to white
label an existing service?
-If you want to sell your homegrown, do you want to do PSTN termination
yourself, or buy PSTN termination in bulk from another provider?
-If you want to do homegrown and want to do PSTN termination yourself, is it
better for you to have PSTN termination and bandwidth on-premises, or host
it? Both has advantages and disadvantages. 

An example setup, assuming you want to roll your own, and offer PSTN
termination on premises:

-An Asterisk box with a T1 card
-PRI line
-Bandwidth with a SLA and / or QoS guarantees
-DNS you control 
-Website (duh)
-Billing facilities

All of the above with the exception of the PRI and the bandwidth are one -
time cost / labor initiatives, and those one-time thingys can be had for the
cost of a download and time to fuss with it to get it where you want
(hardware excluded, natch, you have to pay for that up front)

In a setup like this, the economics work out something like this:

-You have 23 channels to the PSTN
-You have upstream and downstream bandwidth to support all of these 23
channels simultaneously with a comfortable margin

There are PSTN provisioning calculators on the Internet, but I personally
would not provision more than 100 or 120 users on a single PRI. So, your
recurring costs are: (US)

PRI: $600, assuming you get a contract ususally a 2 or 3 year commitment. 
Bandwidth (2.0 Mbps up and down, at least): another $600

Assuming that you have provisioned out your 120 users, your recurring cost
is $10 a month. You resell for, say $20 a month, so you double your money. I
think a competitive price is something on the order of $15 per month per
"line", but let's assume $20 for the hell of it. Double your money is good,
but it's no good when you assume only 120 users. You're only making $1200 a
month! You can't live on that. Once you scale up to, say, 1200 users then
you are talking real dough. 

I have grossly oversimplified this rationalization. There are a bajillion
other variables, like:

-What is your plan when another 9/11 comes along and everyone picks up the
phone at once?
-What is your plan when the power goes out for 24 hours?
-No overhead assumed. It must cost you something to have the facility.
Insurance, taxes. Salaries. What is your plan for this?
-What are you going to offer the user for hardware, or are you? If you are
offering hardware is it full pop, full pop + margin, subsidized, free? If
free, what is the amortization period before you make money?

So, asking a question like yours is kind of like in the Hitch Hiker's Guide
to the Galaxy, when the mega-computer says that the answer to life, the
universe, and everything is "42". The problem is, we don't understand the
question yet. 

Replace "42" with "Asterisk" and I'm hoping you have a Zen moment where you
un-ask the question.

PS the Slashdot style Step 2: ???? + Step 3: Profit comments are +5 funny

hth


-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin Taylor [mailto:kevitayl at nova.edu]
Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 2:50 PM
To: Asterisk-Biz at lists.digium.com
Subject: [Asterisk-biz] Startup


Hello all,

I am relatively new to Voip.  I was wondering if anyone could point me 
in the right direction as to what is required to get a voip business up 
and running.  Perferablly one that can call ptsn phones.  This question 
is vague I know.  Thank you for your help.