Hosted PBX
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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. -
@Dashrender said:
@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 not worked with that many, those are huge numbers.
But of what I've worked with, 1% is laughable. Probably more like 40%. It's enough that I consider it the fundamental risk to voice communications. So large that even if PRI is just 1% of the market it dwarfs the cumulative risk of VoIP of the other 99%.
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In this case, lumping PRI and other legacy circuits. "Non-VoIP"
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@Dashrender said:
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.
Remember you can really only compare those services to POTS to be fair at all. When I went from POTS to Vonage, quality went up, even in 2003 or whenever we put that in. And reliability went through the roof.
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@Dashrender said:
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.
I don't agree and believe you are comparing false things.
SIP is better than PRI in every way. Apples to apples there are zero downsides to SIP. It is more efficient, sounds better, costs less, is more flexible.
If you are talking public shared lines to dedicated lines, which is not PRI vs SIP, then dedicated will sound better and public will be more reliable. Just nature. True for either protocol. For any protocol. The different there between SIP and PRI is that one degrades and the other fails. Which, again, makes SIP superior.
What you are comparing is apples to oranges to feel that SIP has any deficit. It simply does not. If you look at how they work, it is impossible for PRI to compete or have a place in the modern world. Nearly all PRI today is delivered over SIP for exactly that reason - because PRI is so poor that SIP can deliver it. If you think PRI is good, by extension you think SIP is fantastic.
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@Dashrender said:
Consider the medium through which you are delivering most SIP trunks.
This is the important point and cannot be missed... it is the medium you are hearing (or think you are) that doesn't sound as good, not SIP. SIP itself isn't even the audio carrier. On Vonage, they do not use g.711 in order to save money, so you are also hearing their compression. That's now a VoIP or SIP problem, it's a choice of the system in question.
It's very important to isolate the factors and know what is being compared and what is causing the things you feel are inferior. I can have SIP calls that are terrible - but where PRI would not be available. Do you call "total failure" a "really bad call" or do they get a pass by not being able to do it?
It's the Linux and Windows problem - Linux is tremendously easier than Windows in most cases. So much so, that people just assume that they can do things on Linux (and often can) that are impossible on Windows. They feel that "hard" is somehow "harder" than "impossible." This, of course, makes no sense. Nothing is harder than impossible.
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@JaredBusch said:
@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.
What if I run it onsite, with backup server hosted? Seems like the best of both worlds?
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I know that the newer companies like Cox and Comcast are delivering PRI over SIP. Which is why I had little concern over moving to a QOS link provided by Cox for my SIP services.
Again looking at my only other personal experience with SIP being Vontage (oh and I suppose my home service which is undoubtedly SIP converted to analog in my house) Vontage over the internet was not as good as most POTS service I've had in the past. You say your service was better on SIP, I'm guessing that the infrastructure for your POTS lines was just old and crappy so of course you're going to have more issues than my younger system out here in sticks
I do agree that SIP is the we should all be moving.
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@anonymous said:
What if I run it onsite, with backup server hosted? Seems like the best of both worlds?
If by hosted, you mean you buy some space on the internet that you can replicate your settings to, sure that sounds good. But I wouldn't pick a hosted provider - that would be much more expensive.
You do all the work for both places. You setup failover paths for your calls to the other location you setup for your SIP trunks.
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@Dashrender said:
I know that the newer companies like Cox and Comcast are delivering PRI over SIP. Which is why I had little concern over moving to a QOS link provided by Cox for my SIP services.
That's the one way I would never consider SIP. SIP from an ISP is better than a PRI, but is still so awful as to simply be outside of my willingness to consider. Other than lowering cost and increased call quality and flexibility, all of the problems of the legacy world are carried along with it. Dedicated lines for incredibly call quality stability are fine if the budget can justify it, but I know of no case where any service tied to an ISP is okay be it email, DNS, registrar, phones, web hosting, etc.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I know that the newer companies like Cox and Comcast are delivering PRI over SIP. Which is why I had little concern over moving to a QOS link provided by Cox for my SIP services.
That's the one way I would never consider SIP. SIP from an ISP is better than a PRI, but is still so awful as to simply be outside of my willingness to consider. Other than lowering cost and increased call quality and flexibility, all of the problems of the legacy world are carried along with it. Dedicated lines for incredibly call quality stability are fine if the budget can justify it, but I know of no case where any service tied to an ISP is okay be it email, DNS, registrar, phones, web hosting, etc.
As you know, others might not, this was not my choice - while I do personally feel more comfortable (mainly because of my legacy comfort in PRIs) with a provider to my site whole responsible party, I do certainly understand your points.
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@Dashrender said:
@anonymous said:
What if I run it onsite, with backup server hosted? Seems like the best of both worlds?
If by hosted, you mean you buy some space on the internet that you can replicate your settings to, sure that sounds good. But I wouldn't pick a hosted provider - that would be much more expensive.
You do all the work for both places. You setup failover paths for your calls to the other location you setup for your SIP trunks.
Right, setting up and managing the replication will eat at your savings for switching to SIP. Also, in order to even get the offsite PBX useful, you have to be able to answer the calls. If you are failing over to it in the first place, you are going to be having problems and getting all the internal phones switched to register to the different IP is not a trivial task.
