roar

I am looking for someone who has used Vonage or other VoIP network provider to provide voice services for business users. We have a couple of ways we are considering using these services and wanted to see if anyone had input.

1. Use Vonages ability to have a local numbers outside your calling area to allow a customer to provide a local phone number for a local market but the calls actually terminate in their PBX in another state. It seems that with one account you could have multiple local numbers for locations all over the country. Our inital look at this would have the Vonage ATA unit terminate into an analog port on a traditional PBX.

2. Use the VoIP provider to provide cheap outbound LD and local dialing. Anticipate using this in a small remote office that will need some local phone service. Rather than having a POTS line we would use a DSL or Cable modem.

This came up becuase we want to install a DSL or Cable line at a couple of remote offices to provide a backup for signaling and voice if a frame relay link went down and started to think how else we might use the connection.

I would also like to hear if you have other ideas how these new services are saving money or providing new services.

dw31220

We are not using Vonage or any of the Internet based carriers, but we are doing VOIP over cable and DSL to our remote offices. As with all Internet services, these are delivered on a "best-effort" basis. While you can prioritize traffic outbound from the location, those markings are pretty much discarded once they leave the site. This means that voice quality can suffer at any time for long periods. We have a site that is periodically experiencing problems as we speak.

If you are running business class services, you should look into some of the business class VOIP offerings that are emerging. There are alot of carriers offering native SIP or H.323 interfaces over traditional Point-to-Point, Frame, or MPLS data circuits. If you have an office that is already using a Frame circuit for data and a PRI for voice, you can remove the PRI and provision a new data circuit and then use each as a backup for the other with little or no extra cost to the site. These services are guaranteed and usually honor your COS/DSCP settings to ensure good voice quality.

The Vonages,Skypes, and Net2Phones are great for the road warrier/work from home types, but I would be wary of putting an office behind them without some kind of reliable backup in the event your cable/DSl service goes in the dirt.


-DW

PBXtech.info

 

cbennett912

I did this application before, then I took it to the tenth power. Of course you can cut the vonage over as analog trunks, and it works just fine. Then I took 20 vonage lines and flipped then into an Adtran TA850 with FXO blades. I was then able to pass it off to the PBX via DS1. For this, I built a Lesat Cost Route so all LD would use it, and this alleviated there previous trunking issues.

However under this configuration I had issues with CLID. I did this on both a Definity (r10 if I remember), and an IP Office which was this post: Incoming Caller ID on T1 via Adtran FXO

The Definity was flawless, the IP Offce had some trouble.

Inbound worked as expected. You can login to Vonage's website and buildout your hunt groups and even fail-over automatically upon network failure, that was pretty slick. I turned off all of the features it didn't need like CW, VM, etc. And I played with the audio compression and they were happy enough with the lowest compression setting.

So if you have someone spending stupid money in LD, cut one of these over and save them a boat load. Ensure that they have a real large internet pipe, like 1MB Upload minimum (depends on the compression of course). I cutover a cable modem with this dedicated, (cost like $300/month) and for $1300/month they saved huge. With almost unlimited LD, and 6 different out of market numbers (they wanted, could have more obviously).

If nothing else, it was a lot of fun, and it worked!
-CB