Rhaas
join:2005-12-19
Bernie, MO
edit:
September 26th, @11:53PM
| [Tech Ops] Providing voip to customers
We are *finally* getting ready to turn up our softswitch (nortel cs1500) - cut around the 7'th. This will be replacing one of our DMS10's. We have some sip seats we purchased as we had intended on moving a remote to SIP via Occam instead went gr-303 for various reasons. So now I have some SIP seats to play with. What CPE are those of you delivering voip to customers using? Are you providing ATA's at the premise? Sip phones? Routers? |
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sporkme
drop the crantini and move it, sister
Premium,MVM
join:2000-07-01
Budd Lake, NJ
 ·Optimum Online
| I only dabble in the stuff at work, and we only sell to businesses. I learned a simple thing about phones. Cisco is an absolute waste of money, and this is why:
-The hardware is not that great. In our office, we've had 3 out of 12 phones die in less than 3 years. Compare and contrast with your average (cheaper) digital handsets.
-To be legal and get support, you must purchase SmartNet on each phone. If you shop around, it's not too expensive, but it does add up quickly.
-Every version of SIP firmware we ran had at least a few very annoying bugs that your average user may not tolerate. My favorite involves the phone rebooting should you speak/yell too loudly into it. It is a time-consuming process to test and roll out the new firmware.
-Config file download was limited to tftp, this may not be the case with newer phones.
-Our model was EOL'd before they ever really fixed the firmware (7940/60).
-Very bad/scattered/crap documentation on the SIP images.
We had a hosted PBX provider ship out a few $200 Polycom phones to test their services. It was like night and day. The pluses with Polycom:
-Free, open access to firmware and documentation. I cannot stress how nice this is while you're learning the phone.
-Flexible config options - the phone can fetch it's config via tftp, ftp, http and https, and the latter three allow user/pass authentication.
-Solid hardware.
-If there are bugs, they are non-obvious.
-Price, price, price. Some that use the really cheap phones call the Polycoms expensive, but for an office setting, $200 or so a seat is not unreasonable.
-Polycom is 100% behind SIP and they don't need to maintain two sets of firmware like Cisco does.
So what's the ratio of floorspace savings from the DMS to the softswitch? 10:1?  |
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joshg409
join:2005-05-03
Ottumwa, IA
| reply to Rhaas
Second the cisco. You need end to end Cisco for VOIP to work the way you want. IF you made a cisco investment in phones, flash them with asterisk. However we see a lot of Avaya IP office at the larger nationwide corps in our area. We run the Avaya IP Office gear and find that without any tweaking of qos the VOIP works better than cisco call quality wise.
I don't know about what VOIP CPE you should use but for end users the Linksys PAP and the Motorola work fine from what I've seen. |
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Rhaas
join:2005-12-19
Bernie, MO
edit:
September 27th, @10:44PM
| reply to sporkme
Are you providing it over your wireless network to the end subscriber or dumping a pbx on site and then doing something like sip trunking to an outside provider (again over wireless)?
We've played with the Cisco phones and also the Thomson 2300's (i believe) I didn't like the cisco phones. I'll have to look at getting a polycom to play with and see how it works.
I am geekily excited about this softswitch as it's something new to play with, but I am a little apprehensive as it is the start of me witching 'houses' so to say from the ISP side to the telco side..
quote:
So what's the ratio of floorspace savings from the DMS to the softswitch? 10:1?
5:1 in this office and 3:1 in the other office once we bury fiber between the sites. Our second DMS10 will collapse down to roughly 6U of space. LCE/Line bays stay which takes up the most floor space. |
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sporkme
drop the crantini and move it, sister
Premium,MVM
join:2000-07-01
Budd Lake, NJ
·Optimum Online
| said by Rhaas  :Are you providing it over your wireless network to the end subscriber or dumping a pbx on site and then doing something like sip trunking to an outside provider (again over wireless)? We are not wireless (we're in NYC, that would be... insane, at least unlicensed), we're all DSL. We partnered with a hosted PBX provider. They run all the stuff, we just ship out the phones and help people with the initial setup. The QoS is rough on the customers that like to fill their pipes all day. Most DSL CPE (and I'm guessing lots of wireless CPE) just does not have a ton of options to prioritize traffic. We've had to come up with a number of "creative" solutions, but in general it works well. If we did it again, we'd probably choose a different provider and different phones.
I don't see much talk in this forum about VoIP over wireless, does it generally work well? It seems like you'd really have to carefully engineer things to get reliable service...
I just hang out here because there's no general "I'm an ISP" forum. |
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AMD Phreak
Please do the needfull
Premium
join:2003-12-14
| reply to Rhaas
VoIP over wireless works well for us. It is critical though to ensure end-to-end QoS but we all know that.
I've been slowly adding voip phones to our mountain sites and other remote sites for replacement of the pots lines that are there. Crystal clear communications just as if we were on a pots line, plus our dial-up modems for command/control of various equipment still works. |
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polk5
join:2001-12-29
New Orleans, LA
edit:
September 28th, @10:17PM
| reply to Rhaas
I started doing voip over wireless only because I had to after the hurricane here three years ago. Bell took over a year to get back up in some areas. Well, a few went back to bell for phone but most of them either stayed all voip or kept one or two lines for a backup. Using a mix of ata's and polycom handsets. Asterisk box at the data center. Im not running the advantage canopy and no QOS but things still run ok. I am working on upgrading in steps though. BTW, Nice Pic's!! |
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meister1
join:2004-10-25
n0b2g0
| reply to Rhaas
We share a lot of common equipment. We also have a CS1500 (for close to a year), Canopy, and Occam on GR303.
For voip off the CS1500 over Canopy we have been trialing with good success an Audiocodes MP202. We use PPPoE so we let the MP202 be the router so it can use it's internal prioritization. So far we have not had to turn on the priority channel in Canopy. It's small and the voice quality is excellent. If you do use it you will need the latest firmware to work properly with the CS1500.
For voip off of our DSL we have been using a speedtouch 780wl. It's a little expensive but works well. It includes dsl modem, voip, wireless, and a switch all in one neat box.
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joshg409
join:2005-05-03
Ottumwa, IA | reply to Rhaas
How are you "smaller" providers provisiong phone numbers. Are you CLEC's? |
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battleop
join:2005-09-28
00000
| Were currently using Trixbox for now. We have plans to move to enSwitch by the end of the year. The trixbox ok but very clunky for what we are using it for. The enswitch interface is built for service providers and it can be spread across multiple machines to build redundancy.
I decided early on that we would support a limited number of devices. We are currently supporting Cisco and Polycom IP phones, Linksys ATAs and Cisco IAD2400s. Customers are welcome to use anything else but they are on their own beyond a username/password. I've limited what we support because I've already got enough on my plate.
The IAD2400 is the only thing that seems to handle Fax and Credit Card machines reliably. We only use the 2400s over a T1. The only place that we are using the 2400s right now are in hotels. |
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Rhaas
join:2005-12-19
Bernie, MO
| reply to meister1
said by meister1 :We share a lot of common equipment. We also have a CS1500 (for close to a year), Canopy, and Occam on GR303. For voip off the CS1500 over Canopy we have been trialing with good success an Audiocodes MP202. We use PPPoE so we let the MP202 be the router so it can use it's internal prioritization. So far we have not had to turn on the priority channel in Canopy. It's small and the voice quality is excellent. If you do use it you will need the latest firmware to work properly with the CS1500. For voip off of our DSL we have been using a speedtouch 780wl. It's a little expensive but works well. It includes dsl modem, voip, wireless, and a switch all in one neat box. Thats almost identical to us. We were going to do SIP out to the Occam gear we installed but figured out later that we had WAY to much scheduled the night of the cut over. We had an SLC-96 which is TR-08 only so that had to be upgraded (got the occam gear), and 3 other remotes (Nextlevel/Motorola BDT) that had to be changed from tr-08 to gr-303 the night of the cut.. Instead we borrowed a MVIE frame and converted everything ahead of time and put them back into the 10 for now.
What frequency are you using on your canopy gear?
We too use Thomson/SpeedTouch modems, I'll bug our supplier to let me beta one of those modems.
said by joshg409 :How are you "smaller" providers provisiong phone numbers. Are you CLEC's? We are an ILEC.
BattleOP: how are your customers connected to your network? Are you putting a router on site?
Thanks again everyone for your time. |
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viperm
Carpe Diem
Premium
join:2002-07-09
Winchester, CA
| reply to joshg409
We are a CLEC and offer wireless, T-1, DSL etc and are looking at buying a switch ourselves possibly. WE want to offer voip to our customers and bypass the telcos all together...
said by joshg409 :How are you "smaller" providers provisiong phone numbers. Are you CLEC's? |
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sporkme
drop the crantini and move it, sister
Premium,MVM
join:2000-07-01
Budd Lake, NJ
·Optimum Online
| said by viperm :We are a CLEC and offer wireless, T-1, DSL etc and are looking at buying a switch ourselves possibly. WE want to offer voip to our customers and bypass the telcos all together... said by joshg409 :How are you "smaller" providers provisiong phone numbers. Are you CLEC's? I'm not 100% clear on this, but I don't think you need to be a CLEC. We sell DIDs and a hosted PBX (which is hosted by someone else), but I believe that if you have your own "switch", you can buy SIP trunks and DIDs from various wholesalers. |
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battleop
join:2005-09-28
00000 | You do not have to be a Clec to offer VoIP. If you are a small provider it's expensive and a hassle to become one. When you become a certain size it then becomes a good idea to become a CLec. |
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joshg409
join:2005-05-03
Ottumwa, IA
| reply to Rhaas
Maybe we should start a thread on "How to deliver your own VOIP service"
We have a lot of Vonage subs on our network now, and want to offer VOIP but most of our subs are in "Telco COOP" land and they aren't/don't want to play nice when it comes to giving out blocks of numbers. Maybe we should just sell the subs Qwest numbers and be done with it. That has been our hold up. We can get those numbers legally if we had LEC status, since we are not we have to find someone that is and have them get the blocks but lose all of our profit on the service by using the 3rd party. |
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djweis
join:2006-04-02
West Des Moines, IA
| It's not a question of them playing nice, there's a process to go through that doesn't involve the LEC until the end to get blocks of numbers assigned.
There are some exceptions for small rural ILEC's but it mostly relates to collocation and not numbering. |
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superdog
I Need A Drink
Premium,MVM
join:2001-07-13
Lebanon, PA
 ·WaveCrazy.Net
| reply to battleop
said by battleop :You do not have to be a Clec to offer VoIP. If you are a small provider it's expensive and a hassle to become one. Am I correct in stating that once you offer your own VOIP, you are then responsible for things like E911, making certain filings, collecting different tariffs and just a big host of other PITA things to do?. I have always assumed this, and felt like it was more than it is worth for a small guy like me to even mess with this?. Any thoughts?. 
--
»www.wavecrazy.net
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sporkme
drop the crantini and move it, sister
Premium,MVM
join:2000-07-01
Budd Lake, NJ
·Optimum Online
| said by superdog :[Am I correct in stating that once you offer your own VOIP, you are then responsible for things like E911, making certain filings, collecting different tariffs and just a big host of other PITA things to do?. That uncertainty (and not wanting to compete against the cheap VoIP providers) is why we have limited ourselves to business customers. Frankly, you can make more money on one decent sized office than you can with dozens of home customers. And that's just reselling a hosted PBX without having your own equipment...
Businesses get hosed pretty good by the LECs. |
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battleop
join:2005-09-28
00000
| reply to superdog
We are not responsible for sending E911 with the call. We are responsible for submitting E911 info to our PRI carrier. They will send the info with the 911 call. If you are using sip trunks instead of PRIs to terminate your calls there are several companies out there that will do this for you.
The biggest problem I see with E911 is users who move their phones around and do not let us know about the move. I think our contracts handle roaming and what's required to relocate a phone. We only offer VoIP to businesses and most have an on side VoIP pbx for the handsets that use private IPs or we have something like a Cisco IAD2400 that can't be moved. |
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meister1
join:2004-10-25
n0b2g0
| reply to Rhaas
We tested sip direct to Occam but found too many things that didn't work, teen service etc. MGCP should work fine when it gets released in Rel.4. and we have plans to move away from GR303 to pure ip at that time. We are in the process of deploying a couple of cabinets to get closer to the subscribers.
Just using 2.4 and 900 for Canopy. We migrated from another vendors 2.4 and looked at 5.8, but we had some links that we didn't feel would work well at 5.8Ghz. It's hard to upgrade to something then tell customers that due to the upgrade we can no longer provide you reliable service. |
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