I don't think it's an isolated experience Alex. Hosting a box on site is fine if the traffic is primarily coming through that office, but if you have a lot of off-site users, it's not such a good idea. Upstream bandwidth on most internet connections is abysmal. It seems next to impossible to get a symmetric connection at an affordable price. Whenever you have someone connecting from outside, there is a channel in and a channel out. Even if you can re-invite the media, there is still some signalling, and if you are behind a firewall, that makes it tricky.
We have opted for the second approach. We have two redundant machines in a datacenter at 151 front street. This is a little expensive for a small shop, but split across a few hundred users, it's pretty cheap (that's our business model actually). The benefits are that you have tons of bandwidth, (we have 10mb in both directions, and can get 100mb by making a phone call), we have static addresses on the public network, so we can do re-invites, and lots of other neat stuff. They have a great UPS, and a diesel generator, so power failure isn't a big problem. With UNIX machines, remote admin is easy, and we even have LOM or terminal servers with remote reboot capability. I haven't actually been there in almost a year, although I will be stopping by later this week to install a new NAS backup system and clean the fans. Most of our customers are small business, and have at most 6-8 phones per site. Many of them have multiple sites. The customers that do have lots of phones on one site managed to find a building with a shared fiber connection. People routinely use the Meetme conference rooms, with staff joining up from all over the place. With the bandwidth found in a datacenter, 20-30 channels of g.711u is no problem. There are some good deals to be had for co-location. I would give Beanfield techonolgies a call. www.beanfield.ca I think. They have a package down there - 5U cabinet, 2A power (you have a 15 amp circuit, but they charge more if you use more), 100GB of transfer, for $200 per month. Or, you could call us and we'll host it for you. -Tim On Wednesday 14 November 2007 10:32, Alex @ Kovasys Inc. wrote: > I am trying to perfect the way we integrate VoIP as well as giving our > clients choose different integration possibilities. > > a) We host a box on-site with a dedicated provider like Bell or > Videotron providing high speed internet. I find it works good for 2-3 > concurrent calls using either ulaw or g729 but diminishes if the > server is trying to accessed from off-site especially when employees > from India / UK / France trying to use the lines. > b) Host it at a server farm somewhere is more expensive - but provides > more benefits because of constant data flow. > > Am I right in my assumption or I just had a bad experience with > Videotron / Bell? -- Tim St. Pierre IP telephony specialist sip://[EMAIL PROTECTED] Toronto: 647 722 6930 Toll-Free 1 888 488 6940 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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