Voice over IP

[TimS]

I have been looking at this issue for nearly 12 months - but taken no decisions as it is an area clearly still 'in development'.

With a company of some nine people home working - with three regular travellers who always stay when possible in broadband equipped locations as we are highly 'web based'- (we use ADSL and VPN technology primarily to give us shared databases and GDS/CRS access via a central SITA link) we primarily want to have our central telephone number answered at the (home based) office and transferred to whoever is the specialist in the subject (having checked on a live system) whether they are 'at work' at the time - i.e a virtual switchboard.

Our customers are 'world wide' - and we have a phone bill running well into 4 figures a month, which I would very muh like to reduce.

I have spent much of today looking at solutions that we previously dismissed as 'too basic' and have just tested SKYPE (simple and brilliant but limited outbound and no inbound PSTN capability) and BABBLE (still trying to get it to work).

I would appreciate any suggestions for 'short term' and 'long term' solutions.

Thanks

TimS

[R4+Z]

Both NEC and Cisco to name a few have Voip PABX solutions available. I am biased as I work for NEC.

Try Here (http://www.nec.co.uk/index.aspx?id=1)

[Memetic]

I have been looking at www.digium.com they are the main developers of an open source PBX which runs on Linux and Windows called Asterisk. From what I know it looks like it could be useful to you.

The neccesary PC cards are readily available, basic ones go on ebay for sub £20 brand new.

Depending where you are there are consultants around who will set it all up or as it is open source, buy some bits, download the programme and set yourself up.

Memetic

[R4+Z]

I've been thinking about this one since my post yesterday and realised you are'nt really talking about Voip as telephone techs would. When you say Voip (V oice Over Internet Protocol), what you really mean is voice over THE internet.

This is a completely different matter and is highly unlikely to become available for a long time in a truly useable way. The reason for this is due to the way information is propagated over IP. In order to have acceptable voice communications over IP, voice has to be given priority over anything else and it is obviously not in the interests of the service providers to provide this higher priority because for one thing it would chew up the bandwidth for the value added services the internet offers. Another reason is it would decrease revenue in the voice field where a lot of the big ISPs make thier money.

Hope this helps.

R4

[SLB]

I see you are in the UK, so this may be irrelevant ... I have been using Vonage (http://www.vonage.com) Voice over IP (SIP) service for over 18 months. The Vonage service provides a regular US phone number (unlike Skype's SIP service) so incoming calls are no issue. They even migrate existing traditional Bell numbers so it is not necessary to change phone numbers in most cases. Broadband telephony is becoming far more common here. Since I started with Vonage our local broadband provider and AT&T have also started offering the service in my local area too. (AT&T apparently has decided rather than watch their business erode away to join the VOIP groundswell).

I find the Vonage service to be quite good. Of course, a solid broadband connection is important, but that has not been an issue in my office or while traveling using client's office broadband connections. Typically the Vonage service and quality can not be distinguished from traditional telephone lines. There is also an add on called SoftPhone (a Java app that runs on either PC or Mac) that works pretty good, although not as good as the traditional Vonage service via the Cisco box with a standard telephone (but that may be more of a comment on my PC's headset than SoftPhone.) I typically use it from my home/office in Ohio, although I have used SoftPhone from Sweden and France with perfect results on a good broadband connection. Some hotel broadband connections I have used were not so good, suffering dropout during peak usage times within the hotel system (while still working well in the middle of the night / off peak times) Being able to place and receive US calls from any broadband connection anywhere in the world at no additional cost is a big $ savings. BTW I also use Skype for communication with some European customers, and while it is quite good, it does not work as well as Vonage. More than once I have terminated a Skype call to a client in Europe only to immediately reconnect via Vonage without the same quality problems. But that may be a comment on the other person's broadband service ;-)

My telephony costs have reduced by more than 90% vs the local Bell and traditional long distance / international calling fees I had previously paid 8-)