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Start Your Own Open Source-Based Telecom
prostoalex writes "George Ou shows how with the help of open-source VOIP server Asterisk you can start your own telecommunications company for under $6000 '...you can build a phone system that can support 72 analog telephones or fax machines, 100 IP hard or soft phones on site or remote, a T1 line to the public telco for 23 simultaneous external PSTN connections, multiple IP-based IAX trunks to multiple remote offices for seamless toll-bypass 4-digit dialing, IVR, and almost unlimited voice mail for everyone - for under $6,000 in a 1U chassis. Such a price point is easily 10 or more times cheaper than a commercial alternative,' writes George."
We have a few PRIs in some locales which is nice for PSTN termination, but for the most part, we've got an excellent service and we mostly use it for conference calling. We regularly do several hundred hours of conference calling, and the flexability of each user having their own extension is nice.
We've considered reselling the service, since it would be fairly easy to do, just record some custom IVRs and take those CDRs out of the sql backend and bill them. These things may actually happen, or not.. but th ease in setting up the system and making it work through the power of Asterisk is great. I love it and am using it to operate my home lines as well.
I work for a moderate sized telephony services provider, and I can attest that getting above the single T1 "toy" deployment written about here gets really, really hard. The Digium cards are crap, there's very little documentation, and if you try and run multiple carriers then have fun. In a few years this stuff might be pretty decent, and for small office deployments its great, but other than that it is ass.
We just did a VOIP implementation at work this last summer, and while we did not go with asterix, we did get a pretty good price (went with shoretel). However, the biggest single cost of all, was not the T1 installation, or the servers, or the software, it was replacing phones. Replacing 65 phones at our company at about $280 each was a pretty penny. Of course, with asterix you can find relatively cheap SIP phones, but they don't have all the fancy features, LCD's, that make it easy to use, POE, etc. So a hint for all you thinking of looking at VOIP, look at 3 very important things:
1. Yearly costs (maint, support, etc)
2. Upgrade costs. (how much is it to add each additional person. ie. phone+system capacity+licencing+anything else)
3. purchase costs ( for everything, T1 installation, installers, etc)
Look in that order. Many are cheap up front, but their phones are proprietary and cost a fortune, or can't expand in the chassis.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Check out the Sipura SPA-841 ($90. at voxilla.com, etc.). That is MUCH BETTER than the Fujitsu 'office-class' overpriced phones in common use in my 1000-line office.
Use Cisco ATA-186's with a nice analog 2-line callerid phone. Total cost about $180 per station.
I'm setting up Asterisk right now for use in our small office. Actually, it's basically setup now and I'm just waiting for my phones to get here.
;)
.. but then you'd have to dial it like an external number, and the other office wouldn't be able to call an extension directly).
Total cost for the hardware was under CDN$2000 (8 phones, 2-port fxs adapter for analog phones/fax machines, 4-port fxo card for incoming lines, and the PC). I probably spent about 40 hours total after deciding to use asterisk learning about it, configuring everything, and testing. Even at billable $60/hr, that works to $4400, which is a lot less than a comparable commercial system (I got quotes). It didn't actually cost that much anyways, since I don't get paid $60/hr.
We now have a phone system that has an IVR menu, pratically unlimited voicemail, and every other feature you'd expect in a phone system, plus when we open a branch office later this year I can use VoIP trunks to make intra-office calls pretty much free (and easy - encouraging communication between offices).
The system we have now is getting old, to add voicemail to it is $3000 by itself, plus the time to configure it (actually, I'd probably have to get someone to come in and set it up, since I only know the basics of how to program a few features). It can't do VoIP at all (unless you were to plug something into a CO port
This hasn't even gotten into the advanced stuff I can do fairly easily that wouldn't be possible with another system (without spend a LOT of money) -- such as, IVR status updates on system status; allowing customers to query their account balance etc.
Speak before you think
I've been looking at deploying a similar system in an office I work with. As far as I can see, the main advantage is thus:
I can take calls in, on a London number, have them handled by someone in the office, who puts them through to someone just like she normally does and they go to that employee at home. Provided he/she has broadband at home, no extra cost. Brilliant. It's not going to cost us $6000 to implement, more like $300/phone and $500 for the server, we don't need a system of the scale demonstrated, and should make the money back.
Not to mention, pretty cool!
I work in telecom. I find the 6 grand price tag humorous. If you want a soft PBX (which has been done in the past, with mixed results), by all means go for it. You can converge IP with telephony so you will require multi disciplined support staff to keep it running. But don't think even for a moment that you can set up your own phone service provider for $6000. Try multiplying it by 10 and that will be a good start. Then keep dumping money into it for the next 2 years because you sure as hell won't be making a profit until you reach critical mass, AND learn how to balance userbase vs hardlines.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
IIRC, doesn't Asterisk let you use any ASDI phone? As such, there should be lots of nice cheap phones you can use (such as the ones specifically recommended by Digium). You need to make sure you can get the programming codes for the phones you buy, but that isn't as difficult as it once was.
-- sudo.ca
Asterisk can be pretty secure.. and it can be pretty unsecure depending on your config. SIP and most of the VOIP protocols are by default unencrypted. VPN or VLAN should be used whenever privacy is required.
The big thing about Asterisk is control..
My Mitel phone systems are not my own despite having paid up front for them. They have licensing, limited documentation and pay for software upgrades. Mitel won't even let me pay to attend a user level training course unless I have a "endorsement" from the vendor who sold me the hardware. Since becomeing a vendor requires a $20k initial capitol outlay, I have a limited choice of vendors.
With Asterisk I can roll my own or pay someone to do it for me.. and if the vendor tries to squeeze me I can swap vendors. Asterisk is open enough and well documented: even if I don't understand everything, I still can understand enough to tell when the vendor is stretching the truth. Bad customer service is pretty much standard in the telecom world.
My biggest gripe about Asterisk is that is it do not have the fancy (and propriatary) digital phones with multiple soft line and speed dial keys... but thats a trade off.
Open Source gives the customer leverage, and levels the paying field. And sometimes it even costs less.
http://ruk.ca/code/amazon.pl
Perhaps the mods were right and you were trying to be funny, but I'd hate for others to think that you were performing rocket science with your mad coding skillz.
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx
That's what your T1 line is.
No, this isn't starting a telco. This is setting up a PBX for your office, large or small. Timothy just doesn't grok the difference.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
One thing that bugs me about voip is the latency. It deadens the conversation and often leads to collisions between 2 people speaking. QOS in routers can probably solve this problem in the future, but for now there is not much one can.
I set up an asterisk box about 2 weeks ago, configured it to peer with about 10 different voip providers, and have been testing/logging one way and round trip latency.
A typical land line can experience between 60-90ms of latency. I found that latency on voip lines range from 90-250m (IAX2,ulaw codec, optonline cable modem service). We also did a test using 2 Skype clients (both on optonline's network). The latency was about 280ms.
I will be posting results on the voip-info.org wiki soon.
~Rolan
I am by no means an expert, but you can get get POTS connectiveity for independent lines in less than T1 chunks, I believe these are the FXS cards which should be available in 1/2/4 line flavors.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Right, you still need to pay to interconnect with the telephone network so you can be billed for call completion etc.
I've gotten the 4 port Digium TDM boards to work perfectly in recent builds of FreeBSD 5. Check for the zaptel port in /usr/ports.