Hosted PBX
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@scottalanmiller Yeah you would think it would have the opposite effect.
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I'm doing semi-regular conference calls from Crete and it is working here. I think this is a great example of just how incredibly good VoIP is today. Our SIP termination is at JFK in Brooklyn. Our PBX is by the airport in Chicago. I'm on a remote island at the southern tip of Europe as close to Turkey as to mainland Greece and only slightly farther from Libya. My house connection has to connect from the little village I am in to a small local city, from there to the big city on the island, from there up to Athens (no idea how it gets there... undersea cable seems unlikely) then from Athens likely to Belgium. Then over to NYC. Then out to Chicago to connect to the PBX. Then from the PBX it comes all the way back to NYC to hit the SIP trunk.
All that and the audio is just fine. Haven't had any issues yet.
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In 2009 I worked for a week and a half from a SIP phone on my laptop on hotel wifi in Germany connecting to a Canadian PBX to a US SIP trunk and it sounded fine, even with wifi in a hotel seven years ago and three countries involved at a minimum.
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@scottalanmiller Wow... Does geographic location have any bearing on the best SIP provider?
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@scottalanmiller I thought you were in Spain these days.
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@wrx7m said:
@scottalanmiller Wow... Does geographic location have any bearing on the best SIP provider?
Some, but not nearly as much as people think. You do want your PBX and SIP landing location to have a great connection between them. You don't likely want them in different countries. But as long as the latency is low, bandwidth adequate and the trunk reliable, doesn't really matter.
It's all networking, not physical location. So if you have 4ms latency to the SIP landing point, even if it is a billion miles away you don't care.
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@wrx7m said:
@scottalanmiller I thought you were in Spain these days.
That was three countries ago. I was living in Spain a year ago. Spent the summer in Panama with @Bob-Beatty and @pchiodo. Then spent the fall in Nicaragua. In Greece (Crete) for the winter. I'll be moving up to Transylvania for the spring. Then the plan is Quebec for the summer.
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@scottalanmiller Holy cow! Geez. So you just love to travel or is this all work-related, both? And Romania is crazy.
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@scottalanmiller I thought you said latency wasn't really a thing
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@wrx7m said:
@scottalanmiller Holy cow! Geez. So you just love to travel or is this all work-related, both? And Romania is crazy.
Love to travel. We worked really hard to get a lifestyle like this.
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@wrx7m said:
@scottalanmiller I thought you said latency wasn't really a thing
That's what I meant... even with my most extreme locations (not just distance, but things like remote mountain villages or small town on a distant island) the latency isn't enough to be an issue.
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Now once you hit a satellite link... you are screwed. You go to 2 seconds on that one link alone. Game over.
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But on a sat link, non-VoIP audio is useless, too.
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@Each1teach1x27 said:
@gjacobse I know you didn't acquire all those certs to spend your time fiddling around with a phone system
The only Cert I have is Net+ ; all other knowledge has been 30 years of tinkering and just doing things. I learn better when figuring out what button to not push that what someone got paid to write about.... Now I do read white papers and other things.. But I just sit and figure things out. I've done some reverse engineering on systems and web pages as well.
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@scottalanmiller I don't doubt it.
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@Each1teach1x27 said:
@anonymous FYI- Here some carriers I'd consider for Hosted PBX:
- Vonage Business
- Ring Central
- Digium
- Jive
- No
- No
- No
- No
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@wrx7m If that is your opinion, get out of the business and let me have all the people you have been screwing over, because I will convert them and they will save a all that cash dropping proprietary links.
I live in Chicago, connect to a PBX in St Louis connecting to a SIP trunk out of Chicago. I am on my phone all day long with unexplained issues maybe once a week.
In the summer I live in Japan for a month and connect back to the same PBX.
My clients are all similar.
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@JaredBusch WTF is your deal? I'm not screwing anybody over. I'm not a provider and I don't sell PBX or SIP service. I don't sell anything. Seriously, WTF?
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@anonymous said:
We are looking at getting a new onsite PBX, but I have started to think maybe it makes more since to use a Hosted PBX...
What are the Pros and Cons? Anyone have a vendor they like for this?
Assuming that you are only going hosted with your own PBX not something you buy from someplace else.
The technical pros and cons mean go hosted unless your bandwidth can handle the trunk calls but not the in house calls. This is really the biggest concern. SIP calls take 100k. So when Bob calls Sally, you are eating 200k of bandwidth on your pipe. With 50 extensions you can add this up quite quickly.
Because hosted gets your some generally very good reliability. If there wasn't you would not see that host surviving for very long in today's market.
You lose easy redundancy (can't just replicate to another (VM host) with hosted most of the time but with such high reliability, that is a serious mitigation of the risk.
Keeping it on site, you end up with easy redundancy options, but the reliability will suffer. On the other hand you do lower the monthly cost (no hosting) and only add a very minor burden to your VM infrastructure.
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@wrx7m said:
@JaredBusch WTF is your deal? I'm not screwing anybody over. I'm not a provider and I don't sell PBX or SIP service. I don't sell anything. Seriously, WTF?
Right here
@wrx7m said:
I still haven't seen the quality of SIP/VOIP across the internet be stable/good enough for my liking. Sure you can QOS for your network but once it leaves, you can't do jack. I am still a fan of the older-school PRI.
As for call center examples you were referencing. Were these off shored? Because there is a reason the call quality sucks to the off shore call center companies, and it is not because of the technology. It is a combination of bad IT and low margin business practices.
Quality companies in those same locations do not have call quality issues.
