Request for VOIP experiences and resources
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| NoDough Oct 23, 2007 7:16 AM EDT |
Hello All, My place of work is researching VOIP for a possible '08 implementation and I would like your advice. If you have experience with enterprise-wide VOIP or know of some good resource materials then, please chime in. This implementation will cover 4 office locations and roughly 250 phones, so only serious enterprise systems are under consideration. I am keenly interested in open systems such as Asterisk and Digium so, please, pass on any experiences with those. Thanks for your assistance, NoDough |
| jdixon Oct 23, 2007 7:36 AM EDT |
Carla has a series of VOIP writeups somewhere on the web. You might want to take a look at them. I'll see if I can find a link. OK, look at: http://www.voipplanet.com/asterisk/ and http://www.voipplanet.com/fundamentals/ though I don't think the last is by Carla. |
| NoDough Oct 23, 2007 8:38 AM EDT |
Thanks, JD. I'll definitely check them out. NoDough |
| tuxchick Oct 23, 2007 9:10 AM EDT |
Did someone invoke us? *thunder, brimstone* NoDough, there are a lot of "it depends" when you're talking about rolling out a new, from-scratch VoIP network. Are you going to use in-house talent, or do you want to hire gurus to do it for you is the biggest question. Will SIP support be sufficient, or do you need to support other protocols like IAX and H.323? Is your network all clean and shiny and capable of handling VoIP traffic competently? Asterisk is cool, especially if you have coders who can fix the parts that are going to vex you, and believe me you will be vexed. It does not support a distributed architecture very well; companies who do distributed Asterisk do it via all manner of custom hacks. Its biggest flaw for a lot of VoIP admins is the way it handles SIP. Asterisk makes itself the endpoint, so it's also its own biggest bottleneck- all traffic must flow through it. This voids SIP's ability to route the media stream via the most efficient path. These articles should give you a start figuring all this out: VoIPowering Your Office: The Wild iPBX Roundup, Part 1 http://www.voipplanet.com/backgrounders/article.php/3701276 VoIPowering Your Office: The Wild iPBX Roundup, Part 2 http://www.voipplanet.com/backgrounders/article.php/3702621 VoIP Planet is positively infested with years' worth of my articles and has a lot of other good information, so hopefully that will help. |
| jdixon Oct 23, 2007 9:16 AM EDT |
> ...or do you want to hire gurus to do it for you... And, for the right money, I think we know someone who might be qualified. :) |
| tuxchick Oct 23, 2007 10:04 AM EDT |
Eee, don't call me. This stuff scares me. The trickiest bit is call quality. This is easy on networks that you control, but once your poor innocent bits are launched into the Big Evil Intarweb anything can happen. US residents are completely spoiled by decades of reliable, high-quality phone service, and expect the same from VoIP services. Anyone who wants to be a VoIP hero needs to pick a country (like Italy for one example) that has never had good phone service. VoIP is usually an improvement both in quality and availability, so you will be worshiped and adored. |
| NoDough Oct 23, 2007 12:39 PM EDT |
>> Are you going to use in-house talent, or do you want to hire gurus to do it for you is the biggest question. Gurus >>Will SIP support be sufficient, or do you need to support other protocols like IAX and H.323? From what little study I've done on this so far, I understand that IAX is far more efficient than SIP. So, naturally, I would lean in that direction. However, there is nothing that would require it. >> Is your network all clean and shiny and capable of handling VoIP traffic competently? For our corporate offices, yes. For our three branches, we're looking into it and prepared to invest in some upgrades. I'm going to check our your articles after I get everyone's Adobe Acrobat updated so the latest vulnerability won't bite us. Thanks for the help and the pointers. :) |
| Sander_Marechal Oct 23, 2007 2:02 PM EDT |
I'd definately recommend checking our Freeswitch. When I was at T-DOSE two weeks back I talked to one of the developers. It looks quite promising. A whole lot more flexible than Asterisk, and less demanding in hardware too (well, as far as I've been told). They're near a 1.0 release. See http://www.freeswitch.org/ |
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