Hosted PBX
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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.
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@JaredBusch So how does any of what I wrote show I "screw people over" and "sell proprietary systems"?
Are you having a stroke or something?
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@wrx7m said:
@JaredBusch So how does any of what I wrote show I "screw people over" and "sell proprietary systems"?
Are you having a stroke or something?
I never said you sell anyone anything. That is all your own inference.
You said you refuse to use VoIP over the open internet. This implies that you take part in the decision making of phone services. This means your refusal is screwing someone, that I assume is the company you work for, out of saving on the telecom charges. But, not only did you say you refuse to use VoIP over the open internet, you clearly stated you preferred PRI, which is not even VoIP over a carrier guaranteed QoS connection.
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@JaredBusch LOL I really don't get why you think that. I can read and I never said I refuse to use it; I said that I have had better experience with my PRI (that was in place prior to me arriving) than with VOIP across the Internet. I may not have used tons of providers like you have but that's why I come here. To learn from other people's experiences. Get a lay of the land and see what people are up to and implementing. I say what my experiences have shown me and you tell me yours.
Just because you have had fantastic experiences doesn't mean I have. Nor does it mean I'm some dishonest idiot that has some reason to screw my employer out of money and quality voice service.
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@JaredBusch said:
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.
It's important to note that 100Kb/s is just over the theoretical maximum of g.711 calls. We use that number to be an easy to use large number that cannot be exceeded under any condition by a call. It's a safety number for engineers to make sure that calls never get choked by underestimation. It's important to use, but also important to understand.
In reality the maximum is like 99Kb/s, but that makes the math harder for no reason. It's close enough to 100Kb/s and having a tiny buffer for other misses is good. But there are a number of things to consider when using the number...
- If there is silence suppression, moments of silence (which are more common than you think) will drop to almost zero.
- If there is compression on the line, this might get reduced depending on the compression.
- If you don't use g.711, you can drop this number dramatically (at a cost to call quality.) There are several protocols for this, some reduce the size only a little, some a lot. There are about half a dozen popular protocols. Not all carriers are going to support those, so your mileage will vary. It is common for one or two additional to be supported. If you are using a hosted PBX, you generally get a lot or all of the major ones. If you go in house, your SIP trunk provider likely only offers two in most cases (with one having a charge associated with it.)
- If you are using the full 100Kb/s size, you can opt for your internal calls to use g.722 for HD audio using the same envelope, which is quite nice. But almost no one does this because... it's a phone, who cares.
- If you add video to the call, which SIP supports, 100Kb/s is not even remotely enough
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@scottalanmiller said:
I've worked with a lot of PRIs that are far worse.
You post this all the time. I'm curious - considering that you've worked with thousands if not hundreds of thousands of PRI circuits, what percentage of them were horrible? 1%? .1? less?
I've worked only with 10's of PRIs and while I've had the occasional issue, and most of the time they are resolved fairly quickly.
I've with with SIP through vontage and a few other home based options, and just recently put SIP in my office. All of these options are noticeably poorer voice quality than the PRIs I've experienced.
Poorer enough to go back? Nah - of course not. Which moves me to @wrx7m question - when will SIP be as good as old school PRI - I would think the answer is never. Consider the medium through which you are delivering most SIP trunks. The internet a free-for-all network with best effort routing.
To me the question is - is it good enough? So I'd say the answer is yes.
