[gremln007]

Hello,

I am a new poster to this forum (been lurking a while..) and hope this is the right board. I am looking to run Asterisk with VoIP for a small office. We currently have 8 telephone lines + 1 fax and 10 extensions. I have been working with Asterisk and have it mostly setup. I have used Broadvoice for testing. We hope to go live in the next few weeks with the new system. My question is: Can anyone recommend any providers for business lines of service. We are looking for basically what we have now. I have found Teliax and Axvoice but assume there are many others. Anyone recommend some good providers?

Thanks in advance,

Jonathan

[cayman]

Originally Posted by gremln007

I am looking to run Asterisk with VoIP for a small office. We currently have 8 telephone lines + 1 fax and 10 extensions.

Can't (actually won't) really recommend a provider but I would suggest that you do all you can to ensure that you have sufficient uncompromised bandwidth for your max load. With an assymetrical [normal] broadband service, you would be concerned with the upload side. If yu're going to run uncompressed codec, you'll need 80-90kbs for each concurrent connection (including remotes etc).

I assume/recommend that you will maintain some sort of POTS for a fallback. I'd also suggect that a separate FAX *basic* POTS line with a toll-free# mapped to it would be a reasonable approach (works well for us) - only publish the toll-free#. You can later map that wherever you like, including a fax-to-email or whatever. In the meantime, it can be your fall back outgoing, as well as your DSL lne (if needed).

With the consumer level services you've listed, I would caution you that (IMO) consumer level VOIP is *not* fully reliable right now in 2006, no matter the provider and no matter what the cheerleaders write/say. Great features and great pricing, but not great reliability: read the forums here and at dslreports.com for more perspective.

A business lives/dies by communication, some faster or slower, but all do. Be careful and work with a net below you. There may be falls ahead.

Good luck,
- Don

[kitonne]

I would like to suggest getting at least one (two would be better) providers as fall-back solutions for when (not "if") your main voip provider goes down for dial out, plus at least one PSTN line as a life connection for when your internet link goes down.

As mentioned above, VoIP is nice, but it has a long way to go before it reaches the reliability of PSTN. I am advising friends to use it only when there is a backup in place (cell phones or PSTN lines) to cover during outages for a business, or as a second / third line for a house.

A hybrid approach is to use VoIP mostly for outgoing calls, and use PSTN lines for incoming - in case you have an outage, you can still dial out, at a higher rate, and you can change VoIP providers as needed, without having to worry about number portability.

G711 takes up 130KBps each way with all the overheads included (16Kbps for SIP, plus Ethernet, plus TCP/IP) - the raw codec bit rates can be misleading

So far I like the service I get from nufone.net, but for small customers, their tech support is non existent - you mileage may vary. I like the toll free numbers with G729 support and capability of being forwarded to any SIP number, for a very reasonable monthly bill and per minute charge.