Your contention is based on reliable software that can handle thousands of calls per hour and hundred of simultaneous calls. There may be some multi-tenant software that can handle this volume with an unlimited amount of tenants but I would not start a business based on Asterisk to do it. So your hosted system is clearly outside the scope of the guy who wants to provide 15 extensions to a small company with the kind of personal service that hosted system providers cannot offer especially when they they have a system wide outage. The business plan will fall down when 500 customers call you from their cell phones and all you can do is tell them they are 499th. in the queue. Bah Humbug !
Henry[?] On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 1:59 PM, John Lange <[email protected]> wrote: > The market pressure in voice, like every other aspect of IT, is towards > the cloud. As internet connections become faster, geography becomes > increasingly irrelevant allowing organizations to outsource almost > everything they previously did in-house. > > Companies of all sizes are realizing that managing their own > infrastructure is a costly headache and not core to their business. > Recently I've been surprised how many relatively large organizations have > asked for a voice solution but do not want to manage it. > > The smaller the organization, the less sense it makes to "do it yourself". > I've seen far to many "home-brew" Asterisk based solutions installed in > small businesses where there is nobody to support them and the poor small > business owner's entire business is jeopardized by a failure of some kind > (btw, this isn't unique to voice, the same applies to email servers). > > Of your 4 points in favour of on-site PBXs, I would very respectfully say > that I don't agree with them. > > 1. "more features" - Hosted and on-site should have the same feature set. > Perhaps there is a specific example you are thinking of but by and large > the features should be identical. > > 2. "Bandwidth is much less" - This is technically true but with a decent > internet connection this isn't a roadblock. > > 3. "Distributed network" - An on-site PBX does not have a distributed > network nor does it typically have any redundancy. In most of the Free-PBX > installs I've seen, It's typically a crappy Dell single server with zero > redundancy. > > 4. "Off-site Backups" - I've actually never encountered a home-brew > FreePBX system where there were _any_ backups at all, never mind off-site. > But just for the sake of argument lets assume they exist. This still is a > far cry from the kind of redundancy and resiliency you get from your > typical hosted solution. > > Just to provide some balance to this discussion, I still do recommend > on-site solutions in certain situations. Specifically: > > - Client does not have access to a decent internet connection (still an > amazingly common problem even in urban areas). > - Client's expected call volume exceeds what can affordably be put on > their internet connection. > - Client can not obtain number porting to hosted service (typically rural > customers do not have any CLECs in their area). > - Client has a special regulatory requirement which effectively prevents > hosted solutions. > > Regards, > > John > > -- * ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ * *Mr. Henry L. Coleman * * *
