SIP with or without Border Gateway
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@Dashrender said:
I just got off the phone with a Century Link sales guy who's telling me I absolutely must using Border Gateways with dedicated circuits to ensure voice quality, that there's no way my business will want to deal with the poor quality of SIP over the internet.
What say you?
Translation for you:
You must buy our very expensive service and this very expensive add on and pay us to manage all of it. Why? Well, because we told you that is how it works of course. -
Yeah I was wondering if that's the case.
The sales guy specifically stated a service like Ring Central - oh you don't want them, you'll get echo and ghost calls, etc..
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Well, I will agree you do not want Ring Central, but for price reasons, not voice quality.
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Now that's just funny!
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We had this issue come up a couple times when consulting at NTG. We never found it was necessary. SIP over the internet is fine. Even if you have 20 concurrent calls, at around 100kb/call, you're still looking at only 2Mb/sec for VoIP, at any one time. Obviously you'll have a little more than that but still. He's feeding you a line.
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Sales guy blowing spoke to make commission. CenturyLink doesn't come with a good reputation.
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He left out something important - nearly all benefits of SIP are lost if you don't go over the Internet.
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@Reid-Cooper said:
He left out something important - nearly all benefits of SIP are lost if you don't go over the Internet.
This is something @scottalanmiller mentioned to me once.
Please expand upon the benefits for myself and future readers..
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Here I am...
Legacy (traditional) phones were trapped with the voice traffic and the physical line coming from a single vendor. There was no open network. The physical and the logical were tightly coupled. The phone market preys on peoples' existing perceptions of phones being like this and trusting that people will not be aware of how the Internet works to get them to accept the limitations of the 1960s today.
Like email, web hosting, DNS... VoIP (SIP) too should be separate from the provider of the physical connection. This is called loose coupling. The VoIP service travels on the ISP's lines, but it does so on every ISP's line and does so only packet by packet.
By remaining loosely coupled (or really, decoupled in this case) you get:
- No vendor lock in (coupling makes mobility to different ISPs OR different VoIP trunk providers extremely difficult)
- Lower prices (not 100% the case, but nearly so, as there is the ability to price compare)
- Mobility - use the service at multiple locations as needed, migrate in seconds
- Ability to mix for better value - no need to use only a single vendor, get better quality, more reliability or lower prices by using different vendors for different things (multiple trunk providers)
- HA by being able to failover between WAN links to increase uptime
- HA by being able to failover between trunk providers to increase uptime
- HA by being able to failover physical locations to really increase uptime
- HA by being able to migrate to another vendor in case of vendor issues
- More competitive features (coupled providers have zero incentive to provide good prices or features)
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@scottalanmiller said:
Here I am...
Legacy (traditional) phones were trapped with the voice traffic and the physical line coming from a single vendor. There was no open network. The physical and the logical were tightly coupled. The phone market preys on peoples' existing perceptions of phones being like this and trusting that people will not be aware of how the Internet works to get them to accept the limitations of the 1960s today.
Like email, web hosting, DNS... VoIP (SIP) too should be separate from the provider of the physical connection. This is called loose coupling. The VoIP service travels on the ISP's lines, but it does so on every ISP's line and does so only packet by packet.
By remaining loosely coupled (or really, decoupled in this case) you get:
- No vendor lock in (coupling makes mobility to different ISPs OR different VoIP trunk providers extremely difficult)
- Lower prices (not 100% the case, but nearly so, as there is the ability to price compare)
- Mobility - use the service at multiple locations as needed, migrate in seconds
- Ability to mix for better value - no need to use only a single vendor, get better quality, more reliability or lower prices by using different vendors for different things (multiple trunk providers)
- HA by being able to failover between WAN links to increase uptime
- HA by being able to failover between trunk providers to increase uptime
- HA by being able to failover physical locations to really increase uptime
- HA by being able to migrate to another vendor in case of vendor issues
- More competitive features (coupled providers have zero incentive to provide good prices or features)
really good post scott.
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How is QOS on the internet just not an issue for something like phone calls though?
I can only control QOS to the edge of my network.
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@Dashrender said:
How is QOS on the internet just not an issue for something like phone calls though?
I can only control QOS to the edge of my network.
You can always only control QoS to your router. Beyond that you are relying on someone else.
When you pay for a service from a company you are still relying on them to provide the QoS.
The thing is though, that you do not actually need QoS the entire way. You need a low latency response from your network to your SIP provider, nothing more. QoS past the router is paying for that legacy feeling of phone service. That dedicated voice path that was POTS.
Are there people that actually need 100% QoS? Sure there are, but that is not most people at all.
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I Just need to setup a trial and see how it goes.
Thanks all
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QoS is the main (only) advantage of the non-Internet option. It's a question of which is more important to you - guaranteed quality or reliability, cost and flexibility.
Traditional phones and cell phones have unreliable quality. VoIP over the Internet is often as good or better.
Your line quality is a major factor.
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We do the bulk of our SIP (internal and customers) on the open Internet. The sound quality issues are tiny, but the reliability and cost savings are huge.
