one side recorded calls with oreka
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Scott - other than your own articles who is saying that you never ever get any services from your own ISP? I've seen you come out against getting services from this sect or that sect and while some of them make sense, in general you seem against doing any sort of bundling. It's tantamount to saying that if you are a cable provider you shouldn't get HBO or Showtime or the internet or phone services from them - i.e. you should only get basic cable from them.
For example, Let's assume I use my ISP for internet, hosting my public website, phone service, cable TV, and DNS hosting (public DNS). Why is this so horrible? The best part of this is that it's one point of contact and generally a single bill! Sure I might be able to get less expensive hosting, Free (possibly better) DNS hosting, etc, etc... but unless they prove to be horrible at it (nothing says that hosting these separately will be a grand experience) why not?
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the matter is the core business in our company rely on phone calls, kind of call center, so the management believe that relying on staff to manage something crucial is risky, so they delegate this to our ISP, so that they can feel safe because the guaranty that they offer to ensure a better VOIP service is more than i can offer,
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especially we had a previous bad experience on having a voip server on premise (low bandwidth, VPN between 2 remote location ....) we end up having it hosted on our ISP, (between us i'm happy that they do that, lol)
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i can drink my cup of tea and our ISP take charge of our voip service
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the only matter that i have now is how to record the shit calls, i will tried to move to linux and get thing to work
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@Dashrender said:
Scott - other than your own articles who is saying that you never ever get any services from your own ISP?
That was a standard best practice since always. Never be beholded to a single vendor that owns you. It's a general best practice above IT. It's actually enough that it falls into a common sense arena, rather than a best practice.
If we were talking about email, DNS, web hosting, or anything other than VoIP, it would be obviously completely absurd to let someone who owns the access to your business ALSO control the services that are delivered over that. "Bundling" services is a well known anti-best practice because you lose leverage and safety.
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@Dashrender said:
It's tantamount to saying that if you are a cable provider you shouldn't get HBO or Showtime or the internet or phone services from them - i.e. you should only get basic cable from them.
It's funny that you mention that. Because that's exactly a place where people screw themselves all of the time. Look at those bundles, they almost always cost you more and take away your options. While it is a different issue when dealing with consumers, the problems remain. Now getting HBO or Showtime is not bundling, that's different. But getting television and Internet from the same place is bundling (one is increasing the same service, the other is combining different services.)
There is an argument that non-critical or "luxury" services can be bundled. Television, for example, is a service that anyone can simple drop and not pay for anytime. It is not critical. It would save you money to not have it. So as a consumer, bundling your television service with Internet isn't an issue because the cable company has no real leverage to extort you in any way - because you can just drop the service.
Business services are different. Presumably if you get web hosting, DNS, email, telephony, etc. you NEED them and would lose money if they were to stop working. Having your ISP able to extort you, therefore, is a really big deal. And since they not only control the services but the access to services from other vendors you are potentially in a very tough position.
Beyond the common sense aspects, in the real world, no quality service, no even viable service, of this nature exists. Find any ISP that actually offers a good email, web, VoIP or other product.... you really can't. They only sell low end, cheap services to people who are violating the best practice of not getting bundled services and therefore know that they have no real financial benefit to doing a good job since quality of service is not what is creating their customer base.
On top of all of that, there is just the general principle of "best of breed." You should buy the best product for your needs, not the one that is "local" or "bundled." The bundling value is just that you don't have to "bother" finding a provider. It's basically IT skipping its duties. Same as only hiring your consulting company locally. The chances that the local company is any good, let alone as good as the best, approaches zero. So using local as a hiring criteria means you are effectively guaranteeing that you won't consider what is best and just use an artificial criteria to avoid the process of selection.
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@Dashrender said:
For example, Let's assume I use my ISP for internet, hosting my public website, phone service, cable TV, and DNS hosting (public DNS). Why is this so horrible?
- Cost. In the real world, this always costs more. Often a lot more.
- Risk. If your ISP fails or goes out of business or decided that you are too costly to keep as a customer or you decide that they are too expensive to pay.... you not only lose your Internet access, but you lose customer facing services there too! This is enormous risk. Potentially company crippling risk.
- Locational Risk. So big it gets its own risk bullet point. When you are beholden to your ISP for services you can't move to another location potentially. You are tied to the ISP physically. You are creating a massive type of risk that the Internet should have freed you from. It is basically a misunderstanding of the core ideas of a public Internet. If you avoid bundling ephemeral services with a physical line you have this concept of mobility. Mobility for moving to better service. Mobility for moving to a better location. Mobility to move to another provider should one fail.
- Quality. While an ISP "could" provide these services well, the real world results are that they do not. These are not their business or money making services and the best email, web, DNS, VoiP and other companies will always be those available to everyone, not those restricted to just local, physical customers. This is just a general matter of how markets work. Just like the best coffee will never be the free coffee in the local auto garage for customers in the waiting room, the best VoIP will never be the tack on from the ISP. Same concept. It's not what they do, it's not what they care about.
- Extortion. When your ISP not only owns your access to the world but also your presentation to it they know, and you know, that they can often raise rates, threaten, and screw you however they see fit because the choice to be extortable was completely yours.
- Billing. To you, a single bill "sounds nice." To me it sounds like an inability to dispute. What if your phone company, that is also your ISP, decides to bill you for $10,000 of calls you don't think that you made (this really happens, I can tell you an ISP that tried this with us!!) If you have mixed services, and you refuse to pay the bill, they can AND WILL turn off your email, websites, physical Internet access, etc. A single bill for critical services is a scary, scary thing.
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@IT-ADMIN said:
the matter is the core business in our company rely on phone calls, kind of call center, so the management believe that relying on staff to manage something crucial is risky, so they delegate this to our ISP, so that they can feel safe because the guaranty that they offer to ensure a better VOIP service is more than i can offer,
Problems:
- Relying on management that makes reckless decisions based on not understanding the problem domain. The risk here is the managers as they are creating risk by be willing to make decisions based on things they clearly have no knowledge of. That's the most dangerous possible thing.
- Delegating to the ISP alone should be a huge flag. This means management not only doesn't understand IT but doesn't understand basics of business or management.
- The ISP has no particular skills to do this. They aren't even running a minimally enterprise PBX, it would seem.
- Management sought to only delegate SOME of the VoIP to the ISP and not all of it, leaving you with more of a mess than if they had let you run it yourself.
- This argument is fundamentally nonsensical because YOU running a PBX and the ISP running one are hardly the only options. Neither is even the obvious option. It sounds like they ruled out everything that would make business sense so that they could justify a horrible decision by only considering another bad option. This sounds like someone in management is getting a kickback from the ISP.
- If your telephones were truly crucial, the ISP is the last reasonable option. So the reason given by management don't match the reality.
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@IT-ADMIN said:
especially we had a previous bad experience on having a voip server on premise (low bandwidth, VPN between 2 remote location ....) we end up having it hosted on our ISP, (between us i'm happy that they do that, lol)
Why is on premises considered the alternative to having the ISP do it? These are not either/or options.
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@IT-ADMIN said:
i can drink my cup of tea and our ISP take charge of our voip service
Why are you happy that it is the ISP doing this, instead of a competent VoIP vendor?
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@IT-ADMIN said:
the only matter that i have now is how to record the shit calls, i will tried to move to linux and get thing to work
This is a big matter since it is more effort than if you were running the PBX yourself. This undermines all of the value of having someone handle the VoIP for you.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Why are you happy that it is the ISP doing this, instead of a competent VoIP vendor?
because here in qatar there is only one internet service provider,
you will say to me why you don't subscribe with a voip provider in another country, i will response by saying that the management want real DID (i mean a phone number that resemble the normal phone numbers of qatar 8 digit), a foreign VOIP provider will provide you with virtual DID, also we will have both internet and voip on the same line, in opposition to what we have now, we have a dedicated internet line and a dedicated trunk line for voip -
@scottalanmiller said:
This is a big matter since it is more effort than if you were running the PBX yourself. This undermines all of the value of having someone handle the VoIP for you.
not big matter at all, because what i need is only record calls, and i was doing it successfully for a couple of days ago but because of some reasons the recording server stop record the full call, it record only the internal part of the call, and there are other software that do recording without any issue (i tried them) but they are not free,
now i'm trying to fix the bug in this free software by compiling the last version, if it dosn't work we will buy that commercial software (the last option) -
@IT-ADMIN said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Why are you happy that it is the ISP doing this, instead of a competent VoIP vendor?
because here in qatar there is only one internet service provider,
you will say to me why you don't subscribe with a voip provider in another country, i will response by saying that the management want real DID (i mean a phone number that resemble the normal phone numbers of qatar 8 digit), a foreign VOIP provider will provide you with virtual DID, also we will have both internet and voip on the same line, in opposition to what we have now, we have a dedicated internet line and a dedicated trunk line for voipWhat is the difference between a real DID and a virtual DID? How can one tell a "real" from a "virtual" phone number?
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@IT-ADMIN said:
because here in qatar there is only one internet service provider,
There is no ability to have failover at all? This precludes all business class services at a national level.
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@scottalanmiller said:
What is the difference between a real DID and a virtual DID? How can one tell a "real" from a "virtual" phone number?
i mean by real number: a phone number that has a format similar to the phone number format provided by the telephone company (ex : 44552233)
and the virtual number is a weird phone number that differ from the local phone number in terms of how much digits, first extention ...... -
@scottalanmiller said:
What is the difference between a real DID and a virtual DID? How can one tell a "real" from a "virtual" phone number?
yes there is only one ISP in qatar (landline not wireless), we have vodafone but they provide only 4G wireless internet connection, as for wired internet connection only one company (the government)
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@IT-ADMIN said:
@scottalanmiller said:
What is the difference between a real DID and a virtual DID? How can one tell a "real" from a "virtual" phone number?
yes there is only one ISP in qatar (landline not wireless), we have vodafone but they provide only 4G wireless internet connection, as for wired internet connection only one company (the government)
That's awful. If it was the government acting as a government and not as a company it would be one thing. But to actually shut out telephony vendors and others, that's just a government owned monopoly.
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@IT-ADMIN said:
@scottalanmiller said:
What is the difference between a real DID and a virtual DID? How can one tell a "real" from a "virtual" phone number?
i mean by real number: a phone number that has a format similar to the phone number format provided by the telephone company (ex : 44552233)
and the virtual number is a weird phone number that differ from the local phone number in terms of how much digits, first extention ......Oh, refer to the one as a DID and the other as an extension. That's not a virtual DID or anything of the sort. It's literally just an extension.
