More VoIP and some Pixie Dust 1

[PeaveyPhones]

My boss is concerned about us paying .5 a minute for LD when “all around her companies are getting free LD via the internet”. She also wonders why.... I better stop. She's a nice lady. My point is "management" at so many companies is confused by the hype from telecom and networking companies. Talk about yer Pixie Dust! They read an article in the Wall Street Journal, or see an Avaya or an IBM commercial on a Sunday morning and actually believe that you can sit on the beach and magically get to the internet AND the companies LAN via a wireless modem. In a related note one guy wants to know why we have to spend so much money on routers. Hec, he saw one at Kmart for $49, and here we are spending money like drunkin’ sailors on (refurbished) Cisco routers. Of course some of it can be done but the expectations are way out of line.

To my main question. Is there a way to get trunks to a VoIP carrier? Is there such a thing? I could ask our current LD carrier but I expect the answer to be, no. I know Vonage, and others, do it for residential service. Anyone catering to business customers? BTW, we have a G3r R7, two BellSouth T1’s for local and two MCI T1’s for LD.

Richard

Richard
"The unexamined life is not worth living" Socrates

 

[4merAvaya]

G3V7 does IP Trunking the 'old' way, using a modified MAP-D to do the conversion from TDM to IP. That board takes up 3 slots and is not very efficient. V7 IP trunks are not compatible with other Definity IP trunks. As far as network vendors go, I don't think any of the big 3 offer it yet. One of the major concerns is securing your data infrastructure from hacking. Firewalls can only do so much.

Kevin

 

[PeaveyPhones]

4merAvaya,
Very good. I was going to include in my question if there is/was an interface available to get the trunking into the switch but wasn't sure how to say it. Would it be accurate to say Avaya developed the product for the switch but there were no vendors to provide the telco service? I guess that Avaya would have less than 0 interest in selling that solution anyway. I did call an Avaya Business Partner and was told exactly what I expected, upgrade to CM2.




Richard
"The unexamined life is not worth living" Socrates

 

[surplus]

Vonage does have a business offering and from what their website states, it's 49.99 a month unlimited per line. It's a lot more feature loaded than what you are looking for, as they have the voicemail and call waiting and such. I have found call quality to be an issue in going that route (lots of latency, wherein the caller doesn't hear me until 10-15 seconds later at times) I use a Verizon trunk group as the first one out of the switch and then overflow to the Vonage IP lines and it seems to work well for me. It's just extra capacity as needed.

 

[n00benduser]

Have you looked into CLEC's. I know it is a 4 letter word...but a nice pair of ISDN PRI's could cut your .05 to .03 or lower...I found one that even gave me a credit each month to pay for the upgrade to V11. I used to spend close to 5k a month...upgraded, put in the PRI's and now pay 2.5k a month. I was a hero for about three days...then they forget. bastards.

 

[Dunstan]

If you have more then one site (I am not sure if the LD is a concern in general or between your sites). There is another option. You could buy a stand alone VOIP gateway such as those found here

http://www.multitech.com

and use traditional tie trunks to connect to this box (or pri e-1 t-1 etc). This requires no RTU no C-Lan no Medpro et al. It essentially takes your tdm converts it to ethernet for transport and spits it out the other end (Where another office has the same box). These are significantly cheaper (They offer less integration but work well for toll bypass)then IP enabling an older switch.

I work for a very large Corporation and I have trouble trying to explain to Management that the cost savings from VOIP are not really toll related. The real savings come (in our environment) from reduction in PSTn services, ease of MACS and centralized administration not LD savings.

At the rates we pay for LD it would take a million years to justify the IP conversion. But Monthly PSTN circuit reductions and centralized admin as well as disaster recovery is very easy to justify the ROI.

 

[jgideon]

As far as carriers offering true IP origination, there are a couple out there (carrier's carriers), but by the time you factor in IP connectivity to get from your site to theirs, you're not really saving much until you get to huge volumes, and you still have to pay per-minute usage. The ones I've seen have basically been priced like 'bring your own access' t1 offerings... 24 conversation paths for a fixed price per month 'access', with a low usage rate.

 

[mmcalli]

If you are just looking at connecting a remote location to your PBX--read on.
I've setup a couple of MCK boxes between our CA offices and our offices in Bulgaria and have been very pleased with the results. Although the ping times are always in excess of 240ms (delay caused by distance and routers), the quality of the call is still quite acceptable (99% of the time). Since a dedicated, managed VPN, if we could find one, would likely cost us in excess of $5K-$10K/mo, we are simply using the internet. Yes, there have been a few issues, but they are usually local connectivity problems OR short periods of internet congestion. For the cost and the overall reliability and benefits--it's worked great for us. You do need to provide some type of Priority QOS at your edge routers and internally and have a good route between your two endpoints--it helps if both enpoints are on the same providers backbone. Good luck!

 

[PeaveyPhones]

What I've read so far has been helpful. Just to clarify, this would be for LD, not office to office.


Richard
"The unexamined life is not worth living" Socrates

 

[Toni269]

Richard,

Well I think 5 cents a minute is very expensive too. Any chance to re-negotiate your LD contracts? You could the offer out there to 4-5 carriers and get the offers back, tell your provider you want their service but company X offers it for cheaper, then they gotta match the price if they want to keep your business. 5 cents is something anyone can get even at a residence, I know you can get better than that for a business.

Here are some contract negotiation tips:

http://sdaug.com/ContractNegotiation.ppt

 

[PeaveyPhones]

Toni,
The contract we are laboring under was inked 2.5 years ago (before I was here). Contract runs out in June, so I gotta get busy shoppin'. Tell ya whats funny (or not), the person who was questioning why we pay so much for LD is the one who signed off on it, but it's my fault anyway. Thanks for the tips and I'll contact you.
Richard

Richard
"The unexamined life is not worth living" Socrates

 

[Toni269]

Richard - If you re-negotiate with the same company and write a new contract, they can nullify the first agreement. I've done this before in case you don't want to wait untill June.

Toni

 

[n00benduser]

Peavey, email me and I can give you a nice spread sheet to do comparisons. You can add/change it to your liking

david _ limon @ upn . com

Just take out the spaces.

 

[PBXinfo]

T1 vs ISDN shouldnt matter on your LD rate. Its just the method of connecting to the carrier.

I can convert existing MCI/Global Crossing users over to <.02 quite easily if you are looking for a easy solution.

Email me if you are interested and ill forward my sales rep your contact info.

db@t1.bz