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Fixed Wireless Business

Vonage Redux

Members of ISP-Wireless seem convinced of the wisdom of offering VoIP services, but question whether it's better to use an outsourced turnkey product from a popular provider or build a proprietary solution.

[March 4, 2003]

A spinoff of an ISP-Wireless thread concerning Vonage was born in February when MH asked:

"Is it better to resell Vonage, or just have your own VoIP deal? I am leaning towards Vonage, but I like to have a direct hand in everything that happens."

[KC opined] "I think it's better to have your own. You get more control, and reasonably more income."

[MH followed up] "But is the initial cost outlay worth it? When I looked at VoIP the first time (a couple of weeks ago), I needed thousands of dollars of Cisco stuff, and I don't think I had counted everything yet. How would one go about providing VoIP service that acted just like regular phone service?"

[KC replied] "I think it is worth the cost. It's really not that expensive any more; you can buy a packaged solution (voice mail, gateway, etc) for the price of one Cisco AS5300. The end units are near limitless now. And with such a large number of people tired of their phone company . . . "

[JH chimed in] "You can do pretty much the same thing with a midrange PC, Linux, and Asterisk. Linux and Asterisk are free, a single line card is $100 and a T-1 card is about $500. We plan on experimenting with this shortly."

[MH persisted] "Any 911 thoughts . . . please?"

[KC jumped in yet again] "Well, here anyway (in Canada), all *11 requests are handled by the carrier. All I do is make a rule in the gateway, and they're transferred that way. All services are usable, 911, 611, 411, etc."

[MV added] "I haven't built my Asterisk box here yet, so can't speak to what a 'grow your own' solution does with 911, but I presume it's similar to what we do with the Cisco. We program the number that goes out to the public network for both CallerID and 911 services, so it's not an issue. Since we run SMB clients on a service model, this is important. Added help in that regard is that we require an enterprise account to have an analog trunk or two located locally, and just force the 911 calls out one of those numbers, so the Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) clearly identifies what the correct number and address are."

[JH countered] As long as your use agreement clearly states that this is not intended for primary phone service, I believe you get around that. Vonage states the same thing, and probably something similar to their verbage—since it's lawyer-tested—would do the trick.

[MH raised a cost issue] "I just priced out an ISDN PRI and for 23 circuits that are metered. It's $836 or something per month. That's $36 or more per line—plus per-minute and per-call charges. Not sure it'd be a viable option unless I can oversubscribe, which I would most definitely rather not do."

[MV contradicted] "You most definitely do want to oversubscribe. I've got as many as 250 users sitting behind a single PRI and have never seen it break 50 percent usage of channels in three years. Voice is very 'bursty' by its very nature."

[JH agreed] "Unless you're already a CLEC or a phone company, there isn't much money in rolling your own. Five-to-one is pretty normal in land-line over subscription. In order to make the model work you'll need to move to an SS7 type solution."

[KC had slightly different numbers] "I'm told that you can oversubscribe safely at 4:1 I'm not sure about the per-minute and per-call charges, but the long distance is easy enough. There are many places you can go to buy bulk minutes, or become a reseller."

—End