[Cialug] VOIP DIaltone

[John Roach]

Freese Notice a local provider also offers sip trunks and an affordable 
hosted solution.

Tom Pohl wrote:
> 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 
> <mailto: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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