> From: tech-boun...@lists.lopsa.org [mailto:tech-boun...@lists.lopsa.org] > On Behalf Of Ryan Dorman > > Is anyone out there using a "cloud" telephony system that they moved from > an on-prem system be it voip or TDM? Vendors you liked? Vendors you > didn't? Things you would have done differently? > > Thanks in advance for any replies.
Hrmmm... I've use every conceivable variation of solution for this, and there's simply no easy answer. If you use the pots / pri / traditional, then you know exactly what to expect, and that is to say, reliable, predictable, easy to plan for, feature lacking, probably expensive compared to other options. If you get a provider that does SIP trunking, it's a more finely grained scalability solution, because only the requisite bandwidth is sucked down by the voice (unlike PRI, where the channels are more than likely dedicated.) However, very few people do QoS right. So you have to be careful. The test I use is like this: I run a ping monitor to something on the internet (dns server) and then I start a whole mess of simultaneous file transfers. If the traffic overload causes any packets to drop, then QoS is implemented poorly, and you will have real life reliability problems. Keep working until the behavior changes. The main advantage of a sip trunk as opposed to plain old internet voip is QoS end-to-end. So you're guaranteed a certain level of quality. You can use plain old voip providers, such as vonage, 8x8, and so on. You simply configure some devices to connect to some sip service provider, and the quality is internet quality. Which is to say, almost always excellent. But sometimes, traffic is really bad, and your quality might be degraded, or even unusable. In retrospect, the one thing I would say, is from now on, I'll always opt for good features (soft phones, voicemail forwarding attachments, etc) and I don't want to give up control. I really hate it when you're subscribed to some service provider, so it's hard to jump ship, and they are no longer providing the service or quality you expect. To me, it's always important to be able to switch providers easily. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list Tech@lists.lopsa.org https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
