[GRLUG] telephony shake-up again

[Greg Folkert]

On Wed, 2008-02-27 at 13:38 -0500, George (Skip) VerDuin wrote:
> What a story Greg!
> 
> On Wed, 2008-02-27 at 08:07 -0500, Greg Folkert wrote:
> > On Tue, 2008-02-26 at 16:24 -0500, George (Skip) VerDuin wrote:
> >>SNIP<<
> > Or $607/month total cost. Or 18.4610706% the cost per month or almost
> > $2700/month in savings.
> This is a shocker.  Think in terms of "order of magnitude" difference?
> In my world make or break was more in terms of one penny out of thirty.
> 
> How long did it take for the economics to shift this far?

Only in the last 2 years has it *REALLY* come down to economy of scale.
Since Aretta is doing widescale and large scale Asterisk hosting, they
are direct customers of companies of Level3 and Crossroads and Cogentco,
etc... The cost of long distance is so trivial for companies like
Aretta, as they and many other are using "phone exchange clearing
houses" to have nearly zero cost per minute for long distance for them.
They pay a monthly sum to the clearing house... Aretta also provides
services to the clearing house for the reduced sum... a lot like
Internet peering.


> >>SNIP<<
> > The best part of this: We no longer have to be hardware maintainers, nor
> > do we have to worry about disaster recovery, that is Aretta's problem
> > via contract.
> Like insurance?  Let's hope it doesn't come to a test.  The solution you
> mapped "feels good" from the perspective of (below) with lack of
> redundancy.  Especially as we grow more physically remote while also
> growing more interdependent on the intellect of others.

Aretta has seven nines (99.99999%) of uptime guarantees with their
connectivity providers via contracts across the four regional
data-centers in the US. Plus they have disaster recovery plans for each
data center. And since our stuff is "an appliance"


> Recently I had contact with a Grand Haven based application service
> company holding a contract with our beloved large phone company for
> t-3(?) data service to a small server rack that hosted their database in
> their own brick & mortar.  When the cable hardware was damaged the
> contract was voided by the big company but the small company got the
> black eye for missing their up-time target.
> 
> The small company addressed the problem by moving the server to Battle
> Creek adjacent to trunk switch hardware on the Chicago-to-Ann Arbor
> fiber run.  It is sometimes hard to be a small fish with big fish
> feeding in the neighborhood.

Its all in the contracts and how things are covered.

> > In summary, If you have a distributed work-force and would like to have
> > a unified phone system, I'd give a hosted Asterisk setup a hard look. If
> > you only have one brick and mortar building and don't really have an
> > "upscale" Internet connection... (read as a T-1, or other guaranteed
> > uptime Internet service)  your phone system will only be as reliable as
> > your connection then, you might look at a Key-System from the likes of
> > Panasonic or similar (initial cost and setup ~$4000 for 10 phones).
> What started me down this path has more to do with feature
> experimentation than with those issues needed to run a business.  Very
> few really care if my phone doesn't work, but I'm gratified to be
> participating in something solid enough to run a business over.
> 
> What am I looking to do?  Put automatically rejecting phone calls that
> do not carry a caller ID [something I dub as phone spam] at the top of
> the list.  I also want access to voice mail from afar pretty badly.

One word: Vonage

I've had Vonage for a while now and the cost is $30 a month (complete).
I can block non-id'd calls for no additional cost, I get voice-mail via
a local phone call (they have a list of them for each exchange) and also
via the website. As long as you can download/stream the sound file. And
you don't even have to have a device for them to work, you can make it
forward phone calls to you that pass validation.

> Thanks so much for your example -- it is refreshing to see it close to
> home.

Well, we have two local people here. But that is about as local as it
gets.
-- 
greg at gregfolkert.net
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