[asterisk-biz] Does VoIP Really Work for Serious Business?

[William Boehlke]

It works fine, on private networks within enterprises. 

IP providers, as you so eloquently point out, tend to suck.
 

-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-biz-bounces at lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-biz-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Voip Xpress
Sent: Tuesday, March 07, 2006 10:43 AM
To: asterisk-biz at lists.digium.com
Subject: [asterisk-biz] Does VoIP Really Work for Serious Business?

Discussion...is VoIP really ready for serious business use.

We have been installing Asterisk for customers for about a year now, and we
are beginning to wonder if parts of VoIP are really ready for serious
business.  Long Distance in particular is a problem.

We use 3 LD providers, one a Tier 2 provider (ie buys from L3, Sprint etc)
and a couple of  others lower down the food tree (that are often discussed 
on this message board).   We still find that almost all customers complain 
about dropped calls, echo, dead connections from time to time.  My guess is
that maybe 75-90% of calls are connected with decent quality.  The rest are
problems for various reasons, and customers are getting fed up with it.

We have a primary carrier for each route based on quality and cost, and
fallback to another carrier if the call cannot be connected, but we find
invariably that carriers take calls and then dont connect them.

We are at the point of stopping offering LD service.  We make a few c/min,
but the customer disatisfaction is just not worth it.  People wont accept
Skype quality 10-20% of the time.  There is still a good business case for
customers to install VoIP within the enterprise, and for Off premise users,
but to save a few c/min on LD is not worth the trouble.  We have considered
connecting customers up directly to a carrier to cut out the connection
through our own servers.

We have also have mixed success with origination...busy signals, missed
calls and have stopped taking new users.

So...are we alone.  Is it possible to get VoIP LD to be as good as TDM 95%
of the time, and if so how?  We dont have the time to try calls with every
carrier to every area code every day!

(and please, no responses from VoIPjet, Voxee, Junction, broadvoice etc etc
saying how you are different.  We know that you all suck to varying
degrees!)

Help!  VoipXpress

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