[Cialug] VOIP DIaltone

[Tom Pohl]

I can second Vitelity they are great! I think a lot of resellers use  
them as their provider.

-Tom

On Apr 16, 2010, at 6:38 PM, Zachary Kotlarek <zach at kotlarek.com> wrote:

>
> On Apr 16, 2010, at 5:24 PM, L. V. Lammert wrote:
>
>> Looking to see if we can cut phone costs by ditching the analog
>> lines, .. I seem to recall someone mentioning VOIP at the meeting  
>> last fall?
>>
>> Most of the companies in the VOIP market (e.g. Vonage, Skype,
>> MagicJack, ..) target home service (i.e. no hunt groups), don't save
>> much (standard business line ~$25/mo), .. much less allow fax service
>> from what I have seen.
>>
>> Hosted VOIP solutions are much more costly than analog lines, .. so
>> it seems like the best solution would be to drop in an Asterisk box
>> with 10-12 SIP phones, but what/how/where does one get "VOIP
>> Dialtone" at a reasonable cost/feature/quality?
>
>
> What you're looking for is called "termination" in industry terms.  
> Service is typically sold either on a straight per-minute basis or  
> on some combination of a number of recurring charges for  
> "trunks" (i.e. simultaneous calls) and usage. If you get service  
> though someone who is also a local phone company you may also get  
> separate billing rules for local calling, since they're tied into a  
> local phone network. If you want inbound calling you'll pay some  
> recurring charge for registering each phone number, in addition to  
> usage/trunk charges.
>
> There are a whole slew of providers. I use Vitelity, because they're  
> cheap for my usage but they're hardly the only option. If you want  
> to go local I'm pretty sure Internet Solvers sells service and has  
> good rates for local calls. Google can help you find 100 more.
>
> Vitelity is currently charging me $0.011-$0.019/minute for inbound  
> calls and $0.0139/minute for outbound calls with no trunking limits  
> or charges. DIDs are $1.49/month for standard numbers and $0.50/ 
> month for toll-free. If your usage is low this sort of no-recurring- 
> charges model is great. If you're on the phone a lot it's cheaper to  
> buy under one of the other pricing models.
>
> It's relatively hard to get reliable Iowa DIDs via a national VoIP  
> provider. I've tried several and had bad luck with all of them on  
> the PSTN side of things -- the VoIP service worked fine, but I  
> regularly had trouble getting inbound calls because the PSTN  
> interface point was saturated. A real phone company would probably  
> do better in that respect simply by not installing their interface  
> in nowheresville; I just gave up and moved to toll-free numbers and  
> numbers in other states with lower per-minute charges.
>
> Of course with VoIP you're not limited to using the same provider  
> for all types of service (inbound, outbound, local, long distance,  
> etc.) so you can mix and match to get the best rates for each type  
> of service you need. You can also interface a small number of analog  
> lines to your server to keep traditional POTS available for local/ 
> inbound/911/toll-free/etc. calls that may be cheaper to complete  
> over the old phone system while still routing your more expensive  
> calls via the Internet.
>
> Features aren't an issue if you run your own server. You have  
> whatever features you want to support. About the only thing your  
> provider gives you for features are CNAM lookups and routing/ 
> reliability-related features (i.e. will re-route to a PSTN phone if  
> your server is not available, sends alerts on failed calls, etc.).
>
> T.38 fax service is available from many VoIP termination providers,  
> but unless you get/send a lot of faxes it's probably cheaper and  
> easier to let someone pool your fax line with 100 other low-use  
> lines and just interface with them using PDF or TIFF files sent via  
> email or HTTP.
>
>    Zach
>
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