Hosted phone solutions
-
I'm starting with a post I left in another thread so I could start my own thread.
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender lol, wasn't mean to be.
People fear hosting in general, even though it is often more secure and stable. It's just a curse of IT.
The stability is what I fear. The cost of going to a better protected internet connection, or trying to manage multiple ISPs is costly and at times difficult.
i.e. we currently pay $875/month for 10 Mb fiber connection with a 99.999 SLA - of course the SLA is only giving us some cash back if they drop below the SLA, and that doesn't really do me any good when I have 40 patients in the waiting room and I have to cancel because my internet connection went down so I can no longer access my EHR which is entirely online only.
So I can look to bringing in another ISP and different firewall/router equipment to fail over to in case one provider has an issue I can keep working from the other.
In writing this all things considered I can probably save myself a bundle, get two lower class ISPs (cable and DSL) from different providers.
Thoughts?
-
Yeah, This is what my med clients do. be sure QOS is setup, and set one up as a failover or you could load balance.
-
Fiber connections have serve me way better than Cable/DSL connections. I usually have done a Fiber connection + a 10Meg DSL for backup. There's much less latency on fiber and the reliability has been much better. If you don't have many people in the office I wouldn't worry about having the fiber though but, when you have a lot the latency becomes a bigger deal.
-
@Dashrender said:
I'm starting with a post I left in another thread so I could start my own thread.
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender lol, wasn't mean to be.
People fear hosting in general, even though it is often more secure and stable. It's just a curse of IT.
The stability is what I fear. The cost of going to a better protected internet connection, or trying to manage multiple ISPs is costly and at times difficult.
i.e. we currently pay $875/month for 10 Mb fiber connection with a 99.999 SLA - of course the SLA is only giving us some cash back if they drop below the SLA, and that doesn't really do me any good when I have 40 patients in the waiting room and I have to cancel because my internet connection went down so I can no longer access my EHR which is entirely online only.
So I can look to bringing in another ISP and different firewall/router equipment to fail over to in case one provider has an issue I can keep working from the other.
In writing this all things considered I can probably save myself a bundle, get two lower class ISPs (cable and DSL) from different providers.
Thoughts?
I am jealous that you have the option of different ISPs.
-
@coliver said:
@Dashrender said:
I'm starting with a post I left in another thread so I could start my own thread.
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender lol, wasn't mean to be.
People fear hosting in general, even though it is often more secure and stable. It's just a curse of IT.
The stability is what I fear. The cost of going to a better protected internet connection, or trying to manage multiple ISPs is costly and at times difficult.
i.e. we currently pay $875/month for 10 Mb fiber connection with a 99.999 SLA - of course the SLA is only giving us some cash back if they drop below the SLA, and that doesn't really do me any good when I have 40 patients in the waiting room and I have to cancel because my internet connection went down so I can no longer access my EHR which is entirely online only.
So I can look to bringing in another ISP and different firewall/router equipment to fail over to in case one provider has an issue I can keep working from the other.
In writing this all things considered I can probably save myself a bundle, get two lower class ISPs (cable and DSL) from different providers.
Thoughts?
I am jealous that you have the option of different ISPs.
You likely have some carrier class Ethernet (fiber) providers you can tap into. It's not always cheap. Lumos goes up north but I'm not sure where in PA/NY area it stops.
-
@thecreativeone91 said:
@coliver said:
@Dashrender said:
I'm starting with a post I left in another thread so I could start my own thread.
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender lol, wasn't mean to be.
People fear hosting in general, even though it is often more secure and stable. It's just a curse of IT.
The stability is what I fear. The cost of going to a better protected internet connection, or trying to manage multiple ISPs is costly and at times difficult.
i.e. we currently pay $875/month for 10 Mb fiber connection with a 99.999 SLA - of course the SLA is only giving us some cash back if they drop below the SLA, and that doesn't really do me any good when I have 40 patients in the waiting room and I have to cancel because my internet connection went down so I can no longer access my EHR which is entirely online only.
So I can look to bringing in another ISP and different firewall/router equipment to fail over to in case one provider has an issue I can keep working from the other.
In writing this all things considered I can probably save myself a bundle, get two lower class ISPs (cable and DSL) from different providers.
Thoughts?
I am jealous that you have the option of different ISPs.
You likely have some carrier class Ethernet (fiber) providers you can tap into. It's not always cheap. Lumos goes up north but I'm not sure where in PA/NY area it stops.
No... we don't really. I am in the literal middle of no where. I have two options and one is prohibitively expensive.
-
@Dashrender said:
In writing this all things considered I can probably save myself a bundle, get two lower class ISPs (cable and DSL) from different providers.
That's the standard way to fix the problem. Nearly always blows those "specialty lines" out of the water. Faster, cheaper, more reliable.
-
@thecreativeone91 said:
Fiber connections have serve me way better than Cable/DSL connections. I usually have done a Fiber connection + a 10Meg DSL for backup. There's much less latency on fiber and the reliability has been much better. If you don't have many people in the office I wouldn't worry about having the fiber though but, when you have a lot the latency becomes a bigger deal.
I've not found a fiber provider that beats Optimum cable for latency yet.
-
Toward my goal, I've purchased a Dev3 box from C@C. put CentOS 6.5 on it and installed FreePBX on it. I'll get a few phones attached yet this afternoon, and look to pick a few SIP trunks from voip.ms today or tomorrow.
-
@scottalanmiller said:
I've not found a fiber provider that beats Optimum cable for latency yet.
You've dealt with crappy fiber providers then. Hurricane Electric is one of the best.
-
@thecreativeone91 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
I've not found a fiber provider that beats Optimum cable for latency yet.
You've dealt with crappy fiber providers then. Hurricane Electric is one of the best.
Is HE under 4ms latency and under $50/mo?
-
@scottalanmiller said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
I've not found a fiber provider that beats Optimum cable for latency yet.
You've dealt with crappy fiber providers then. Hurricane Electric is one of the best.
Is HE under 4ms latency and under $50/mo?
My home connection isn't even under $50 a month. You are comparing apples to oranges. The connections serve way to different people. Sure if you are talking about the tiny SMB shop go for the $50 connection. But when you get into large scales it doesn't meet the need. You tend to assume everyone is very tiny expect for where you are.
-
uh oh derail in progress.
-
Latency is definitely important for a hosted solution. But I can't afford to pay $1000's a month for it, and I don't have to when I can get something that's legacy for $540/m for a PRI.
-
Heck, even going with the dreaded dedicated provider circuit from my telephony provider goes from $540/month to $240 if I move to SIP trunks, and that gives me a dedicated circuit from them to me a la PRI. latency issues would be completely on them.
-
@Dashrender said:
Heck, even going with the dreaded dedicated provider circuit from my telephony provider goes from $540/month to $240 if I move to SIP trunks, and that gives me a dedicated circuit from them to me a la PRI. latency issues would be completely on them.
Remember, an SLA protects the vendor, not you. Sure, you can blame them when you can't make a call. But it is you not making calls anymore. You have to weight the benefits of blame for blame's sake versus actually staying in business.
-
@Dashrender said:
Heck, even going with the dreaded dedicated provider circuit from my telephony provider goes from $540/month to $240 if I move to SIP trunks, and that gives me a dedicated circuit from them to me a la PRI. latency issues would be completely on them.
But may not be fixed. A PRI in many cases is feed via a SIP trunk. Many people think PRI's are more reliable but they really aren't.
-
@Dashrender said:
Latency is definitely important for a hosted solution. But I can't afford to pay $1000's a month for it, and I don't have to when I can get something that's legacy for $540/m for a PRI.
Best hosted solutions with the lowest latency are also near the cheapest. If you pay over $40/mo total you are at the best possible latency numbers. No one, anywhere, can touch Amazon, Azure, Rackspace and similar latency.
-
@thecreativeone91 said:
But may not be fixed. A PRI in many cases is feed via a SIP trunk. Many people think PRI's are more reliable but they really aren't.
PRI = no reliability, and no flexibility to deal with issues when they arise. Vendor lock in to the extreme.
-
Sure, Amazon, etc might have very low latency - but they don't control your endpoint, and that is probably just as important if not more so!
