[Asterisk-Users] Can exsiting router handle VoIP traffic?

[Colin Anderson]

Short answer: Yes. It's just data.

Long answer:

In your LAN:

Usually depends on the nature of the "other" data on your LAN. If you LAN
has a ton of traffic you will have to use something like QoS tagging to
ensure that your voice traffic is prioritized. Any decent switch supports
this tagging and / or will retransmit frames "as-recieved". In a lot of call
centres you might see the agents using telnet sessions or a web based CRM
which is lightweight traffic - wise and won't interfere with VoIP even
without QoS, except in extreme cases where you have thousands of users in
multiple subnets with single bottlenecks like everyone hitting the same
server.

On the Internet:

Because the Internet is "best effort" by design there's no guarantee that
packets will be delivered in-order, out-of-order, or even at all. Any
quality of service tagging you do on your end is largely a pointless
exercise because intermediate routers between you and your service provider
will not honor the tag. As well, an inherent risk for a pure VoIP setup on
the Internet is DoS'ing - a single script kiddie can make your day bad.
Consider what would happen to your call centre should another Code Red day
happen. You have to make a business decision as to whether the cost savings
and flexibility that a pure VoIP setup would give you vs the risk of the
call centre being without service for X amount of hours because of Internet
problems. 

You may want to consider a hybrid approach, where you under-provision a PSTN
connection such as a PRI (say, a single PRI for a couple of hundred users)
and have calls overflow to a VoIP provider once the channel limit is
reached. This way, you can take advantage of some of the cost savings and
flexibility of VoIP and you have a backup that automatically kicks in should
your Internet connection or VoIP provider goes down. If this happens, your
capacity to process calls is diminished, but not completely toast. It's nice
in Asterisk, because you *can* do this as opposed to a lot of other PBX'es
where it's their way or the highway. 

One last thing to consider: I see that you work for Nintendo. It's my
understanding that the latest Ethereal builds can identify and decode SIP
and IAX packets to audio. What would Nintendo's feelings be on call centre
data being transmitted on the Internet where it would be possible to
intercept and decode this data. What would the legal and / or corporate
ramifications be if this did happen? You can argue that this kind of thing
can happen with a PSTN connection, however, that requires physical proximity
and access to the line itself, which you control. In a VoIP scenario, once
the packets traverse your firewall and get onto the Internet, they are
essentially public property. 

hth

-----Original Message-----
From: Tielin Xu [mailto:TIELXU01 at noa.nintendo.com]
Sent: Wednesday, August 24, 2005 10:22 AM
To: asterisk-users at lists.digium.com
Subject: [Asterisk-Users] Can exsiting router handle VoIP traffic?


Hi All:

I'd like to test a pure VoIP call center set up under Asterisk, Can I use
existing IP routers to get VoIP traffic from service provider to Asterisk
with good quality of voice? In other words, do I have to do any hardware
upgrade to make VoIP work in existing enterprise environement, we have 10g
Ethernet LAN?

Many thanks,

Tielin

_______________________________________________
Asterisk-Users mailing list
Asterisk-Users at lists.digium.com
http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit:
   http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users