[Cialug] VOIP DIaltone

[Zachary Kotlarek]

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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