[Asterisk-biz] Who uses only VOIP for their business?

[Andrew Kohlsmith]

On Wednesday 16 November 2005 18:10, Michael Welter wrote:
> I had to pull a customer off of TelIAX a month ago because of warble.  I
> put them on NuFone and everything was fine.  Today I had to pull them
> off NuFone and put them back on TelIAX because calls to NuFone weren't
> going through.  Everything is fine on TelIAX today.

This is why you have failover in your dialplan with two or three providers.  
This isn't a provider issue, this is an internet issue.

I've had *zero* downtime with Nufone.  It's always been either my end or my 
route to Nufone.  Every time.  

My business has a PRI but it is located downtown and we have a single SDSL 
loop on which every call, incoming and outgoing, including faxes, runs 
through two Asterisk boxes.  My dialplan will dial tollfree and local through 
the PRI.  Longdistance tries Unlimitel first for any of their on-net 
termination (it's cheaper), failing over to Nufone, failing over to 
Asterlink, and finally failing over to the PRI.  Faxes always go through the 
PRI, at least until I get chan_fax working reliably, at which point any LD 
faxing will go through FaxMicro.

You don't need to keep insane balances with your failover carriers, either.  I 
have a $50 credit with Unlimitel, $500 through nufone and $50 through 
Asterlink, as we tend to terminate the bulk of our calls through Nufone.  
Your system should be alerting you when a prime route failed, and all the 
termination providers I use give me billing information so I can top the 
accounts back up if they run close to zero.

It works *very* well.  I have a couple of customers who I have provided DIDs 
from my PRI to, and they are 100% VOIP connected.  We've had our odd hiccup 
but I would say that we are down less than 15 minutes over three months, 
which would give us an approximate 99.965% uptime figure.  The key is not 
screwing with the system when it's working, and testing your solutions before 
pushing them live.

We're fortunate because since it's all business we can schedule updates and 
changes in the wee hours when nobody's calling.  If we were larger we would 
have been able to afford a full test lab, but this works well enough for us 
and our customers.

> So, I would recommend having a current accounts with several vendors.
> And you might want to read about ChanIsAvail.

ChanIsAvail doesn't work all that great for VOIP hops;  1.2.0 had a patch of 
mine go in which actually returns CHANUNAVAIL for IAX2 and SIP links if the 
qualify timer expires, which is how I do failover.

Honestly, for VOIP you need a good solid internet connection to a good solid 
provider.  We use DSL because once you hit the BAS you're on a very solid 
network, at least until you hit your reseller's bandwidth, but we use a solid 
reseller.  :-)  

-A.