On 7/7/06, augustynr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi, I am considering using * to run the phones in the small(12 unit) apartment building and I am looking for your input. Does it make sense? What setup would you use? What works and what does not.
I would be very wary of putting the typical landlord in a position where they're responsible for paying tenants' long distance bills and then collecting from tenants; and being responsible for maintaining phone service, supporting it, billing for it, turning it off when people don't pay, etc. Also, you're likely to run into competition from cell providers; lots of people now use cell phones as their only phone, or primary phone. Have you considered whether or not any residents will want/need to use FAX or modems behind your equipment? Further, this sort of configuration precludes the apartment residents from getting DSL service - you'll also have to be an ISP. Or .. if you provide net connectivity, or if they can get cable modem service, they may avoid your captive VoIP and sign up for third-party VoIP. Also, this may turn out to be expensive if the tenants do unusual things with the lines/jacks in their units - traditional telcos have a lot of protection in place and use equipment designed to absorb spikes, surges, shorts, and all of the other weird things that happen when you expose your wiring to people who don't care what happens to your equipment (or are actively hostile). I wouldn't want to let the average apartment tenant get an opportunity to blow an expensive PCI card because they monkeyed around with the wiring while installing an extra extension on the other side of the bedroom. If you are intending to share FXO ports among many tenants, you'll also end up with weird caller ID - the outbound calls won't show the caller ID of the tenant, but of the shared line, which will probably seem like a disadvantage to the tenants; unless you force caller ID to be blocked, which also might be a disadvantage. I would be more inclined towards an all-VoIP scenario, which would let you get caller ID set correctly (and let call recipients use *69 or whatever the call-return feature is) - but now you've got to worry about 911 calls, and find a DSL/net connection that provides something approaching traditional "five nines" (99.999%) reliability. Even so, I think this might turn out to be a disaster if you end up with a few heavy users as tenants - bigger organizations can use the law of large numbers to average out families with multiple teenagers against mostly idle residential FAX lines, etc., so that their user-to-facility ratios are reasonable while avoiding resource shortages. A 12-unit building doesn't give you a great opportunity for averaging - so if you end up with 4 or 5 units who are heavy telephone users, you may end up needing to spend more to provide service than you're charging for it. Also, think about days like Mother's Day (do you do that in Canada?), Christmas, etc., when residential phone usage tends to peak - if you don't want pissed-off tenants/users, you'll need to provide facilities adequate to meet peak demand, not just average demand. I don't mean to be a grouch, but I think that people in North America have pretty high standards for POTS service that are tough to meet as a small provider, especially if this isn't your everyday business, and especially where the users are often indifferent or hostile to the service provider, as is typical in a rental setting. Has your friend looked at providing coin-operated laundry machines? In the US, there are a number of vendors who provide/maintain them on an outsourced basis and simply write a check to the landlord every month or so for the landlord's share of the amounts collected. -- Greg Broiles, JD, LLM Tax, EA [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Lists only. Not for confidential communications.) Law Office of Gregory A. Broiles San Jose, CA _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
