Hosted VoIP???
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@siringo said in Hosted VoIP???:
I'm no comms guru, I understand how a VPN for a single user works, but how do we connect office A to office B via VPN/ I'm sure this is an elementary question to those who know, but I'd be grateful if someone can throw some plain english explanations at me so I can get started.
A VPN is a tunnel from one place to another. Compare it to ethernet. If you connect a PC to a switch via ethernet, that's like a Client VPN connection. If you connect two switches via ethernet, that's like a site to site VPN. VPN is just a tunnel between two places. Those can be PCs, routers, whatever.
Think of it like the MPLS. The MPLS can connect sites or a PC to a site. From a "how do we connect" perspective, VPN does everything an MPLS does, just cheaper, faster and secure.
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@JasGot said in Hosted VoIP???:
@Dashrender said in Hosted VoIP???:
The past is never a showing of future endeavors. And a happy CEO? that seems like the wrong approach.
Often, it is a requirement to stay employed.
Right, if the goal of the business is politics, not profits. So only when the CEO isn't acting as a CEO. Which is a LOT of the time, that's why system admins earn, on average, more than CEOs in America. The average system admin knows more about business than the average CEO.
This is one of those sad states of IT.... which people do we placate instead of doing a good job in order to stay hired. Our boss? Their boss? The owner? All depends who finds out what is wrong and who finds out who didn't tell someone else.
In this case, we know the CEO isn't doing a good job for a business. If the CEO is the owner, that makes this a hobby business and we don't care. If the CEO is being instructed not to do a good job but owner, that also makes it a hobby business. If there are public investors, that makes this a violation of the CEO's ethical and legal responsibilities to them. But it's impossible to catch and prove as the CEO can simply claim incompetence and that's perfectly legal and impossible to prove.
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@siringo said in Hosted VoIP???:
I've been reading up on SD-WAN this morning. Some sites say "replace your MPLS network with SD-WAN and save money" other sites say that "you must keep your current MPLS network to use SD-WAN".
I wonder which one it is? Could be dependant upon the amount of traffic between sites???It's ALL marketing. SD-WAN is the new product made to fleece people now that MPLS has been exposed as such a scam for so long. But if you are looking at SD-WAN, that implies you are following the same process that exposed you to MPLS is the first place - going to the wrong vendors who are out to sell you something.
You should be looking for an IT solution here, not looking for vendors to sell you something.
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@JaredBusch said in Hosted VoIP???:
@siringo said in Hosted VoIP???:
Could be dependant upon the amount of traffic between sites???
No. SDWAN is the new MPLS, with lower costs.
You get a device for each site and plug it in to your various internet connections. Can be more than one at each site.
It aggregates everything over a set of virtual IP addresses.
So you never "go down" assuming you chose the multiple ISP connections well.
Also your IP never changes. No matter what ISP the traffic is routing on. So things like VoIP don't drop calls when services switch.
But you pay for your bandwith through the aggregator.
It will always be more expensive than setting up your own site to site VPN, but gains you minor benefits. Minor for most businesses. There are absolutely some businesses that are a great fit for SDWAN.
The problem here is that none of this is guaranteed with an SD-WAN. SD-WAN is a marketing term and all mesh VPN solutions are also SD-WAN solutions. So it's 1990s' technology with a flashy new name. There is some cool new tech available out there, but just because a vendor offers SD-WAN branding doesn't imply that they actually do any of that stuff.
SD-WAN can be at any cost, use any tech, have any redundancy that you and the vendor work out.
And you can build your own SD-WAN, in any fashion that you want.
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@siringo said in Hosted VoIP???:
With the MPLS setup, all sites appear as one large site. They can 'net use', browse shares via Windows Explorer and so on. Can you do that with an SD WAN implementation?
You can do that with anything, including SD-WAN, VPN, etc. It's exactly the thing we are saying that you shouldn't want to do (and we doubt that you actually do), but every technology we've mentioned all along does that automatically. This is a standard pattern that we've been literally doing since before MPLS existed. Remember ALL of this is MPLS copying VPN setups, not the other way around.
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@siringo said in Hosted VoIP???:
And what do you guys think of using a provider that is not located in the same country? Our daytime is pretty much the night time for the rest of the world, could be tricky regarding support?
For what, phones? That's a factor of the provider's support agreement with you and nothing else. Someone in your country could easily have worse hours than someone outside. Where they are located doesn't mean you can guess what their support hours are. It will give you a hint as to which ones are more likely, but nothing else. You should base your decision on their support hours, not their location.
In fact, you shouldn't even consider location in anything IT. Only the resulting services. If the resulting service is best, it is best. Where it comes from is irrelevant.
If you mean for MPLS/SDWAN/VPN then we are back to "under no circumstances should you have anything called a provider" in your process.
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thanks @scottalanmiller plenty to think about there.
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@siringo said in Hosted VoIP???:
thanks @scottalanmiller plenty to think about there.
Brave New World here
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@scottalanmiller said in Hosted VoIP???:
A happy CEO doesn't matter at all, happy owners are
In this neck of the woods, 99% of the CEOs are THE owners.
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@scottalanmiller said in Hosted VoIP???:
You are seeing longer than necessary outages,
No, not really. When a contractor cuts a fiber line with a backhoe, and the ISP is there is 20 minutes, that's a good SLA for the customer.
In our world, real world problems are not like you anticipate.
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@scottalanmiller said in Hosted VoIP???:
higher than necessary cost and a CEO that clearly doesn't know what he's doing.
No cost is too high if the CEO (also owner) can justify it in his head.
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@scottalanmiller said in Hosted VoIP???:
If the CEO is the owner, that makes this a hobby business and we don't care.
I would say 85%+ of businesses in America are hobby businesses by your definitions (this post and others). I'm not arguing; just stating what I have seen in 30+ years of servicing highly successful privately owned corporations. I consider "highly successful" to be 25Mil+ in annual revenue.
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@JasGot said in Hosted VoIP???:
@scottalanmiller said in Hosted VoIP???:
higher than necessary cost and a CEO that clearly doesn't know what he's doing.
No cost is too high if the CEO (also owner) can justify it in his head.
If you are a hobby then that is true. If you are a business, then that's not true. All comes down to objective:
Hobby Objective: Make the owner happy.
Business Objective: Profits -
@JasGot said in Hosted VoIP???:
@scottalanmiller said in Hosted VoIP???:
If the CEO is the owner, that makes this a hobby business and we don't care.
I would say 85%+ of businesses in America are hobby businesses by your definitions (this post and others). I'm not arguing; just stating what I have seen in 30+ years of servicing highly successful privately owned corporations. I consider "highly successful" to be 25Mil+ in annual revenue.
That's roughly the number that I state to people. So I definitely agree. Far and away MOST organizations classified under business law in the US serve the purpose of the owner's ego or whims and do not have the purpose of running as a business. They use the guise of business either for the tax haven that it provides or for the ego boost that it tends to give.
And to be clear, NTG is a hobby because we are not profits focused. I don't "accuse" others of something I don't accept being myself. We take business seriously, but we ourselves are a hobby because we put our employees ahead of profits and we definitely will engage in unprofitable business for fun (e.g. we might invest in a restaurant not because it's the wise business decision but because it should be a fun way to not lose too much money.)
We are legally a business, of course, and are way less of a hobby than most hobby businesses, but we are a hobby nonetheless.
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@JasGot said in Hosted VoIP???:
@scottalanmiller said in Hosted VoIP???:
You are seeing longer than necessary outages,
No, not really. When a contractor cuts a fiber line with a backhoe, and the ISP is there is 20 minutes, that's a good SLA for the customer.
In our world, real world problems are not like you anticipate.
In the real world, we consistently see fiber cuts to public lines getting priority over SLA'd lines. SLA's protect the vendor from needing to prioritize those lines because they are relieved from "best effort." SLA always means "less than best effort."
I've seen SLA'd outages where they were supposed to be just a few hours extend to months because the punishment of the SLA was less than the cost of repair. But because the SLA meant that the contract was still in place the customer couldn't stop paying because the vendor was meeting their SLA obligation by paying the fee (often not as big as the fee the customer pays.). So the vendor was making more money by not meeting the SLA time frame.
To see how an SLA works you can't look at it in absolute terms but relative ones. People with SLAs talk about "they got me fixed in under the two hours we agreed to" while people without SLAs talk mostly about how they didn't have to pay anything and were fixed in minutes.
I'm talking real world, I've never, literally never, seen someone benefit from an SLA. But the CEO's whose reputations would be tarnished if they admitted to their failure, always claim that they'd rather have the company lose money than to not have someone to blame for it.
That's where an SLA comes into play. When you don't care about profits, but need someone to blame. If your company is about politics (blame game) rather than profits (bottom line) then you are 1. a hobby and 2. perfect for an SLA.
Except anyone familiar with how an SLA works would then blame whoever signed one.
Literally just got off of a phone call with a customer who got absolutely screwed by an SLA contract.
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@JasGot said in Hosted VoIP???:
@scottalanmiller said in Hosted VoIP???:
A happy CEO doesn't matter at all, happy owners are
In this neck of the woods, 99% of the CEOs are THE owners.
Not uncommon and nothing wrong with that. But it's important to classify "happiness" at the topmost level of the hats that they wear.
Even as the owner, their CEO hatted self should feel shame for wasting their money and getting an emotional "fix" from having someone to blame for their own failings. As a CEO, playing politics with myself is, quite frankly, embarrassing. Imagine if you ever had to explain to someone, like at the country club, that you intentionally threw away your own money because you liked the ability to blame someone other than yourself, except you can't because it was your decision, but you got a piece of paper that said that you could, so it made you happy.
That's like... straight jacket time. But that's literally the conversation we are assuming is going on in the owner's head!
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@siringo I have worked in this space since 1998, which makes me old! Lol. The major difference isn't the SDWAN vs MPLS. It's the loss/jitter tolerance of modern voice codecs, i.e. the software that takes your voice, samples it, and encodes it into packets on a wire.
When VoIP was startign out, right around the time I joined the workforce, QoS over SLA-backed PtP cirvuits, later MPLS. were absolutely necessary, as was an solid QoS networking config/deployment.
That's when "G.711" and "G.729" were pre-eminent. G.729 was used to compress voice across WAN links, and it was not at all loss or jitter tolerant. Barely any loss/excessive jitter, and forget it.
Modern codecs- Opus especially (Opus has been added to the public domain) - are incomparably better than predecessors. Full detail here: https://opus-codec.org/. It is adaptive, meaning, it will adapt to network conditions, expanding up to wideband if the bandwidth is available, but having the ability to adapt to network conditions in ways G.729 couldn't come close to.
In there early days of improved codecs - SILK, iLBC, I was a holdout, like most early VoIP engineers who suffered through the early pain points. However, the proof is in the reality that some of the largest organizations in the world, and all major prem, and cloud IP-PBX/UCaaS providers support Opus. Think about COVID - are any of us connecting across MPLS anymore? Nope. Voice quality issues? Here and there, and just as often having to do with acoustic echo caused by poor mic/speakers as it is network packet loss, etc. Mostly, we all do just fine. This wouldn't have been posible without these codec advancements.
I spent years building Nortel, the Cisco, then Cisco/Microsoft UC practices. These days, I strongly advise you no longer think of VoIP as something you buy. Think of it as a feature of you broader commmunication collaboraation solution. Maybe that's Cisco Webex Voice/Teams. Maybe that's Microsoft Teams. Maybe that's Google Voice and Slack.
My point is - buying a dedicated Voice, or even Voice/Video, or even Voice/Video/Meetings solution is an anachronism. Personally, I view Microsoft Teams, either with Microsoft-provided PSTN access for smaller businesses, or self-provided SIP Trunking, i.e. "Direct Routing," as the best platform. Not all the corner case voice features are there yet - Cisco's platform does that better - but Microsoft's platform addresses much more critical path items that Cisco never will, whereas Microsoft will close voice gap/mostly has.
My 2 cents!
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@kmac76 said in Hosted VoIP???:
My point is - buying a dedicated Voice, or even Voice/Video, or even Voice/Video/Meetings solution is an anachronism. Personally, I view Microsoft Teams, either with Microsoft-provided PSTN access for smaller businesses, or self-provided SIP Trunking, i.e. "Direct Routing," as the best platform. Not all the corner case voice features are there yet - Cisco's platform does that better - but Microsoft's platform addresses much more critical path items that Cisco never will, whereas Microsoft will close voice gap/mostly has.
Huh - I think your idea is sound, the problem is cost. I looked at the cost of Teams with PSTN access and it was outrageous compared to splitting the PSTN access out of Teams. Heck Teams is "free" if you have M365 already.
I looked at Teams PSTN access last year it was around $20/user/month, and there is zero extension to extension calling - i.e. you want to call the person next you, you have to dial their 10 digit number. Not to mention I didn't look into what it takes to manage physical devices (desk phones) connected to Teams.
My host PBX solution and PSTN access costs me around $12/u/m, that's a significant savings.
