Thanks!
John Todd wrote:
[crossposted to isp-clec and asterisk-users]
That's not such a great price at 11 million minutes, in my opinion.
Did you ask them if they would speak to Asterisk via SIP? We have on this list (asterisk-users) made some short lists of retail providers of minutes (see archives,) but it would be interesting to see what wholesale providers will warrant Asterisk use with their SIP gateways as "acceptable".
Questions for y'all to ask when you start fishing:
- do you need dedicated interconnect with the network of the termination provider? In our example of L3, do you need to buy a fast ethernet of IP bandwidth from Level3, or will they take the traffic across a peer or other transit customer's link (in other words: the Internet.)
- what codecs are supported? Some providers insist on G.711, which strikes me as underhanded at worst and significantly short-sighted, at best. If they support Asterisk (yay!) do they allow iLBC, GSM, and Speex?
- how are CDR's transmitted back to the customer? Daily? Live? Monthly (agh!)? Via the Internet, or on tape/cd?
- are media streams restricted to a single (or very few) IP addresses, or will they take media streams from "anywhere"? Again, many providers seem to want to break SIP's model of peer-to-peer media transmission, even when it's possible, for various "business" reasons.
- are there any geographic considerations for sending traffic? Are there any area code/prefix sets which cost more?
- are there any topological considerations for sending traffic? If traffic shifts between appearing on the East Coast, and then fails over (as an example) to coming in through a West Cost network perspective, does that change any SLAs or pricing?
- if the provider offers multiple rates to North American destinations, how often does that rate table update? How is that rate table provided?
- in what format does the provider offer international rate updates? How often?
- does the provider offer private or public ENUM lookup for destinations locally served, if they provide DID's to their larger customer base? what is the provider's plan for ENUM rollout once NANP is fully ENUM capable?
As you speak with providers, so long as there is no NDA, please share your experiences with the list. The medium-sized call-centric shops and call centers would benefit greatly from hearing the possible competitive alternatives that might be connected to Asterisk systems.
This again brings up the topic of asterisk-biz mailing list, if there is any traffic. However, I doubt there will be much traffic since it seems the people who do many minutes keep their mouths shut, at least on this list.
JT
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