[vosechu]

I'm considering BV for my provider but I'm not sure what I need in order to hook up all the people in my appartment building. I would like to have seperate numbers for each person but I'm unclear on what's needed.

My thinking is that I need to be using Asterisk as my proxy? Actually, I have no clue. I'd appreciate any help as I'm having trouble finding clear answers about this.

Thank you in advance!

-Chuck

[VOIP_knight]

Is the building already wired or are you starting from scratch? I think that you need to provide an aweful lot more detail such as:

Number of apartments? Number of floors? An ISP who bills you and is willing to let you share your connection?

Please help us to help you

[mberlant]

If you want to outfit your entire building with service that you provide you will need to do a few things in order to get your project going.

First of all, you need to decide whether you will force your tenants to use your service or if will be just a very appealing option. Assuming that you are in the US, you will probably need to confirm with your state's Public Utilities Commission whether you are legally permitted to exclude other companies (like the local phone company) from servicing your tenants directly.

Next, you need to size up the service. How many lines (apartments plus second lines) will you need to provide for? How active do you expect them to be (how many Erlangs)? That will tell you how many trunks and DID numbers you will need from your service provider. It will also tell you how much internet bandwidth (or private bandwidth, if the service is large enough) you will need to support the traffic.

Third, how do you intend to handle data and fax traffic, neither of which is commercially viable over the internet?

Fourth, will you use internal line cards or external ATAs to deliver service to your tenants?

Fifth, are you also planning to offer internet service to your tenants? If yes, how will this bandwidth consumption affect the VoIP traffic? If no, how will you prevent your tenants from implementing their own VoIP service over their own internet service?

Sixth, assuming that you can accomplish the first five challenges successfully, can you price the service to your clients at a competitive price that still affords you a profit after you have paid for clearing challenges 1 through 5?

[jpeisen]

Maybe he's planning on including phone service in the rent, as opposed to marketing the service to his tenants? Of course, he didn't even mention if he was the landlord at all -- he could be a tenant and just have the desire to hook up his friends w/cheap phone service.

Anyway - too many questions about what is being asked here. In general though, I doubt BroadVoice service would be a good option, since each phone number will either run a decent amount of $$ or be limited when compared to a phone company line. In particular (and in my opinion) the lack of E911 support makes it unsuitable for replacement of traditional phones on such a grand scale. I suppose you could have one land line available for emergency calls, but what if your asterisk server crashes / loses power / etc?

Maybe a hybrid setup... Each apartment gets a Sipura SPA-3000 w/VoIP service (from BV or whoever) and the POTS line is a lifeline shared between some number of apartments and only used for emergency calls... Something like that might work.

[mberlant]

I think we scared him away. This poor fellow saw Ka-Ching in his eyes and we soured that with the facts.