mrbueno
join:2002-08-03
US
| VoIP via WiFi
Anyone doing this with success?
I feel and will probably always feel that the best way to provide a triple play product is to own a platform for each product. VoIP is not the same as land line voice and shouldn't be offered as such.
That said, I also feel it's important to prove you can do what "the big guys" do otherwise your typical consumer will think you are a sub par service. Even if they don't want all the services you offer, they want to see that you offer them. That said, VoIP is the quickest way for us to add perceived value to the brand.
What equipment has worked for you?
TIA |
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RockyBB
Premium
join:2005-01-31
Longmont, CO
| It's not just equipment. It's also network connections for call completion, billing system upgrades to support charging for toll minutes (especially for international calls), E911 support, calculating then assessing then collecting then remitting taxes, regulatory filings, constant watch over call counts to ensure that there is no abuse resulting in uncollectible debts for calls your customers will deny making, technical support staff who can walk folks through using their phones and routers and PCs through your network ... and, of course, having Tier I internet connections yourself so that you have a chance of offering a quality service without tremendous churn.
On the other hand, if you don't offer a VOIP service yourself, then Vonage and Packet 8 and Sunrocket will find your customers and use your bandwidth for free to generate their own revenue.
A happy middle ground is to offer either a private labeled service (where another company does all the fulfillment and customer service) or to recommend one or two specific providers -- both types of which would pay you a commission for users that you refer ... |
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jwb4273
@liveair.net
| reply to mrbueno
As long as your access points are capable of handling the traffic.... our Proxim APs at 30 clients can't cut the VOIP mustard and have their Data too. (SIP Traffic).
For TV, right now forget it. (You could do Ondemand with Akimbo). I recommend going DirecTV reseller and just doing the install - it looks like triple play; but they still get 2 bills. |
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lutful
Premium
join:2005-06-16
Ottawa, ON
 ·TekSavvy Solutions..
2 edits | reply to mrbueno
Discussion of VoIP over wifi in past threads:
»Wireless + Voip
»What's the 'correct' way to handle VOIP over wireless
»VOIP services
I experiemented with VoIP over 802.11b back in 2004 and discovered a simple firmware modification (AP sends phones CTS without a prior RTS) helps VoIP capacity and performance a lot without affecting standard-compliant CPEs if they always do a RTS to get a CTS from AP. »Re: VoIP, with and without computer data ?
said by mrbueno  :I also feel it's important to prove you can do what "the big guys" do otherwise your typical consumer will think you are a sub par service. I have a cool anecdote on this topic.
Back in Feb 2004, the whole IT department of UQO ( »www.uqo.ca/ ) was moved off campus with their 22 phones and 2 faxes plus all the computers used for network monitoring of whole campus.
They got quotes for 2xT1 lines from Bell Canada and they also considered using T1 radios. But the big problem was that the main PBX was in a different campus and they could not (easily) make a link to T1 radio from main PBX.
Anyway I helped to setup a reasonable cost Airaya 5.3Ghz "wifi" link with Engage IP Tube boxes to carry the T1 through their network cloud.
After some PBX debugging, their 22 phones and 2 faxes were working at "almost toll quality" plus they were getting average 20Mbps "almost full-duplex" data link to main campus network.
All over a half-duplex WiFi link. |
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mrbueno
join:2002-08-03
US
| reply to mrbueno
Thanks for the replies. Just so we don't all get ahead of ourselves I'll be more specific.
Do you currently have a wireless network built out that you successfully provide VoIP services over? What is working for you? An equally helpful question to answer would be, "Did you fail at providing VoIP over a wireless network."
There is alot of new equipment out there over the past couple of months. The landscape is changing. Gateworks base units move alot more packets than older equivalents. Alvarion has an optimized system in the VL, but is anyone using it for VoIP?
While the post regarding what it takes to provide VoIP services could be helpful for others, it's beyond the scope I was looking for.
What Access Point/Client combos are those of you who are succeeding using?
viperm: Any comments on your VL gear? |
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lutful
Premium
join:2005-06-16
Ottawa, ON
·TekSavvy Solutions..
| said by mrbueno :Do you currently have a wireless network built out that you successfully provide VoIP services over? What is working for you? I used to help other WISPs build networks but they all do have many customers running VoIP successfully.
VoIP is almost the norm for their rural customers as they pay long distance fees otherwise even to call the nearby cities.
The AP/CPE in those working networks range from Senao CB3 to Soekris/Prism/m0n0wall to Zinwell to WRAP/Atheros. Some Airaya and some WRAP/SR5 backhauls.
said by mrbueno :"Did you fail at providing VoIP over a wireless network." It worked on all networks with variable quality after some debugging. Using QoS judiciously at all intermediate nodes improved the call quality to acceptable otherwise it was like a walkie-talkie conversation. |
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Rahail
join:2005-12-21
Troy, MI
| reply to mrbueno
Mrbueno it work prettymuch good if you can avoid your user not use 2.4ghz cordless phone  if you are yousing 802.11b/g product.. however I dont have much user to do more test I have only 20user they are about 1 mile away from my noc doing voip over Wireless My setup
Dlb2300 As AP
High Gain low cost CPe and Buffalo Router with dd-wrt firmware as ap
Asterisk PBx installed at my noc
Hope that help |
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mrbueno
join:2002-08-03
US | Thanks for the input. Anyone out there with VL? |
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superdog
I Need A Drink
Premium,MVM
join:2001-07-13
Lebanon, PA
| While I can't comment on VL gear directly, as I have never used or installed it. I do have a friend that threw them up, and the results were impressive as the VL gear uses a special QOS setup to make VOIP priority over everything else. The VL AP's themselves are also setup to handle a large amount of concurrent VOIP calls, as the VL line does a lot of packets per second. I have customers using VOIP on both FHSS, 802.11b and 802.11a radios. The VOIP users on the FHSS radios complain about call quality to some extent, and the users on 802.11b/g radios fare a little bit better and the call quality gets better but it really works the best, to the point of toll quality on the 802.11a radios. I have NEVER had a complaint from any of my 5Ghz customers about VOIP. I am not sure what the rating is for these OSBridge radios as far as PPS are concerned?, but it must be fairly high as VOIP works great on these radios.
--
»www.wavecrazy.net Join WISPA today! »www.wispa.org/ |
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Believer
join:2002-07-04
Baltimore, MD
| We use VL for VoIP and it is outstanding. The radios have been set to prioritize VoIP data as well as in our routers. A test was run with commercial VoIP test equipment between two sectors pushing 18 VoIP calls at the same time with data without problems. VL PtMP is used for backhaul to some PoPs where VoIP is used as well.
Canopy has been used as well with great results but we never pushed a lot of VoIP or data at the same time to stress the links like we did with VL.
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Comtrain Certified Tower Climber |
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mrbueno
join:2002-08-03
US
| reply to mrbueno
So it sounds like between high PPS and sometype of QoS tagging should be the answer.
To take this a step further, I read that with VL gear if you use an Alvarion VoIP gateway you could easily limit the number of VoIP calls out. I don't see how this is different from limiting the number of VoIP connections via iptables any comments on that?
One more quick question, how much are the Alvarion units going for through the Coop? |
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lutful
Premium
join:2005-06-16
Ottawa, ON
·TekSavvy Solutions..
| I will suggest that proper QoS configuration is much more important for best VoIP quality than any other parameter such as high PPS.
You could selectively give preference to RTP traffic from "approved" VoIP devices using known MAC address prefixes. Use shorter queues with less traffic shaping to lower latency and improve jitter.
The rest of the "unapproved" VoIP traffic will still go through but quality will be worse than "approved" devices as the packets will linger in longer queues.
That could make more customers want to buy approved VoIP devices from you. |
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gunther_01
Premium
join:2004-03-29
Saybrook, IL | And along comes Net Neutrality laws, Then what?
Superdog, that would be another good one to discuss with FCC |
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pleary
@sbcglobal.net
1 edit
 from:
John Galt
| reply to mrbueno
Hi folks,
A friend forwarded me this thread. I will jump in long enough only to answer questions if seen. Anyone is welcome to follow up with me directly at patrick.leary@alvarion.com. I am also the creater and executve for the AlvarionCOMNET program, so I'm happy answer those questions too.
The current BreezeACCESS VL running software version 4.0 has about a 750% improvement in VoIP performance over v3.1. Specifically, one sector can now support 288 concurrent VoIP calles compared to maybe 40 (with the wind at our backs!) previously. There are two reasons:
1. the frames per second increase, due to things like concatenation, but also a few other mechanisms, is very high now even for small packets. Basically the capacity of the system is now pretty level regardless of the the packets sizes, which makes it easy to capacity plan. I do have some good graphically data and tables fromtesting done by a national CLEC. I can send them to anyone that is interested.
2. We've created a new protocal called WLP (wireless link prioritization). This mechanism prioritizes tagged packets over the air across the entire sector and it does so dynamically instead of partitioning off capacity for priority traffic. Previously (and is still the situation with most) you can pioritize across the wire all day long but when it hits the air all bets off. This way the voice goes first, across the entire sector, before the data whle at the same time there is a mechanism to prevent the starvation of the low priority traffic. Again, I have some good graphs of this in action for any who want it.
MOD NOTE: The next portion of this post more or less violates this sites anti-spam policy. I will let it stay because of this quote:said by mrbueno :One more quick question, how much are the Alvarion units going for through the Coop? I mentioned this fact so that other posters realize why a listing of pricing in a post by a vendor was allowed.
Pricing? Under the AlvarionCOMNET program the most a WISP would pay for VL CPE is $285; the least would be $245. Of course these are complete CPE (with antenna integrated, power supply, etc.). The $285 price requires a modest quarterly commitment of 25 units, so the barrier to entry is pretty low and tailored to small WISPs. With entry into the program come some other modest benefits like access to a special members only Web site, special drag and drop collateral for WISPs to market their services in the community, a dedicated discussion board (not much active yet), etc.
Also, under the program the aggregate sold through the program accrues to create additional discounts for all members on their next quarter's CPE shipment. This assumes the collective volume achieves certain levels, with the additional discounts being more as certain milestones are achieved.
I hope this answers. Have a good weekend people. |
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satseeker1
join:2005-11-08
Spain
| We have been doing Voip on our WiFi network for almost 18 months and have around 400 clients with Voip accounts,our Voip wholesaler provides accounting and client web access to their accounts,they provide us with a range of local number DIDs and we can activate or disactivate accounts on line.We have ping times of around 30ms from our NOC to our providers servers.I think they use Nivis soft switches .Clients are given monthly accounts and we charge a security deposit.Clients spend an average of 25€ per month on calls and we make around half.
The contentions for Voip can be very high as I have never seen more than 20 simultaneous connections at any one time.
We achieve toll quality calls on our Canopy,using diffserv ,packets are tagged all the way from the Linksys PAP2 to the Mikrotik which gives highest priority to our Voip clients.We use G711 codec. Our 11b clients have cell phone quality ,and at peak times some have problems, however changing anyone who complains to Canopy cures the problem.
A Canopy white paper claims 27 concurrent call per sector,claims I usually half, and even with 12 concurrent calls per sector with the contentions aforementioned we will have no problems connecting 70/80 clients per sector.
We have looked at Alvarion Breeze Access V4 and it looks very impressive and possibly capable of delivering IPTV /VOD,the prices in Europe seem a lot higher and if anyone would care to supply 25 packs to us please send a PM.
If you have clients who want to use Faxes make sure your provider supports the T38 protocol, as in band pass through using G711 can be very flakey and unreliable. |
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