Becoming your own VOIP service provider

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

Yes I know it’s a big question, but I’m interested in anyone who can point to information in regards to what steps are needed to be undertaken.

From my own research I understand the following:

  1. You can use Asterisk as a VOIP service provider.
  2. You need to connect it either to a T1 link to provide indial numbers or to a VOIP service provider that specialises in wholesale solutions.

My understanding is that there are two ways it could be configured:

  1. Asterisk box configured with T1 incoming lines and a good internet connections. Use the DID numbers associated with the T1 line to assign external numbers to your clients. Set up the dialling plan so that when a customer rings an outside number it redirects through one of the myriad of local and international VOIP/PSTN gateways.

  2. Much the same as the above except you use a wholesale VOIP provider to provide the VOIP/PSTN link for your external numbers.

Now, is any of the above correct, or am I completely off the mark?

Any help appreciated.

Cheers, Ian

2

An interesting question indeed…

Are you setting up to be a VOIP provider?

My understanding is you would need to have a gateway, softswitches,
to connect and bridge your VOIP network to PSTN.

I’d be interested to hear the replies.

3

Ok… This is going to ruffle feathers, but I’m gonna say it anyway…

Don’t be a VOIP service provider. It’s a temporary business at best, and won’t survive if VOIP becomes widely adopted.

Everyone forgets that no one at all NEEDS a VOIP provider to make a VOIP phone call. All we really need them for, is to be a bridge from a VOIP call to the PSTN. If your call’s destination is another VOIP endpoint you can, with just about any VOIP phone, just dial the IP address and call the phone. No VOIP provider necessary, and no monthly charge.

Right now, the VOIP market is trying desperately to look a lot like the PBX/PSTN thing we have today. I’m making an assumption, but I think it’s to help spur adoption by convincing legacy telecom people (like me) that the two methods are basically the same.

However, it wouldn’t take much to wipe it all out. All you’d have to do is migrate the registration services to something like your email system. You wouldn’t dial phone numbers, you’d dial dufus @ somedomain .com. The messaging server would respond, “his registration says his phone is at this IP” and your phone would start to send packets directly to my phone. It might respond “he’s not on the net right now, here’s his voicemail greeting”, or “he says he’s busy, here’s his voicemail greeting”. Either way, VOIP providers are not involved. Just my broadband provider, who hosts my messaging server.

Instead of a client server thing, (like what we’re building today) where the services are provided by a central server, it will probably end up being peer-to-peer. Phones will create their own conferences, play their own mp3 files for music on hold, and only consult servers to find out how to address the packets, or where to store and retrieve the voicemail messages. Phones just need a little proccessor and memory boost to make it all possible.

Big things like IVR and ACD will be their own application servers, but most people don’t need those.

You don’t need Vonage or any other provider to place a VOIP call. You only need them to connect your call to the PSTN. When VOIP becomes more widely adopted, you won’t need them at all, because your call’s endpoint won’t be on the PSTN. It’s a business model that’ll be doomed by it’s own success.

4

Isnt that something like freeworlddialup now? I mean, you can be anywhere in the world, all you need is some provider who can

  • provide a registry service so you can register and allow others to lookup for you
  • provide value add service such as voice mail, conference, etc.

Besides connectivity to pstn, arent above what a voip provider does?

5

I think the point I’m making is that VOIP providers don’t provide anything except the connection to the final leg of a call (the PSTN) and some method of familiar endpoint addressing (phone number to IP address translation).

  • They don’t provide you a phone. (You buy that.)
  • They don’t provide you a voice to ethernet adapter. (You buy that as well.)
  • They don’t provide your broadband connection. (You buy that too.)
  • They are not responsible for call quality. (Sorry!)
  • They don’t provide power for your service. (Got batteries?)
  • They can’t, in most cases, reach your local emergency (911) service. (Oh well!)

If the registrations are moved to another familiar addressing scheme (like email addresses) and the endpoint of the call is not the PSTN, (which will be true after wide adoption of VOIP) then they’ll provide nothing that you don’t already have by getting a broadband connection and a VOIP phone that can talk to your messaging system (which your broadband provider will probably give you for nothing, like they do with email today).

Current VOIP service business models will end up being a lot like asking people to pay for a traditional phone, and then trying to sell them prepaid phone cards to make local calls.

I just don’t see a future in getting people to pay you for things you can already get free from another source.

6

I have lookd into doing this and believe the call handeling is the easy part. The two main problems I see are price (can you compete with vonage or other VOIP carriers) and FCC regulations.

To be competive you would need to be a CLEC that way you get your interconnects to the pstn at a lower rate compared to say as buisness buying a PRI from someone. From the people I have talked with to become a CLEC is no small task.

FCC regulations are just coming into play so who knows what is going to be required before long.

7

[quote=“dufus”]Ok… This is going to ruffle feathers, but I’m gonna say it anyway…

Don’t be a VOIP service provider. It’s a temporary business at best, and won’t survive if VOIP becomes widely adopted.

Everyone forgets that no one at all NEEDS a VOIP provider to make a VOIP phone call. All we really need them for, is to be a bridge from a VOIP call to the PSTN. If your call’s destination is another VOIP endpoint you can, with just about any VOIP phone, just dial the IP address and call the phone. No VOIP provider necessary, and no monthly charge.

Right now, the VOIP market is trying desperately to look a lot like the PBX/PSTN thing we have today. I’m making an assumption, but I think it’s to help spur adoption by convincing legacy telecom people (like me) that the two methods are basically the same.

However, it wouldn’t take much to wipe it all out. All you’d have to do is migrate the registration services to something like your email system. You wouldn’t dial phone numbers, you’d dial dufus @ somedomain .com. The messaging server would respond, “his registration says his phone is at this IP” and your phone would start to send packets directly to my phone. It might respond “he’s not on the net right now, here’s his voicemail greeting”, or “he says he’s busy, here’s his voicemail greeting”. Either way, VOIP providers are not involved. Just my broadband provider, who hosts my messaging server.

Instead of a client server thing, (like what we’re building today) where the services are provided by a central server, it will probably end up being peer-to-peer. Phones will create their own conferences, play their own mp3 files for music on hold, and only consult servers to find out how to address the packets, or where to store and retrieve the voicemail messages. Phones just need a little proccessor and memory boost to make it all possible.

Big things like IVR and ACD will be their own application servers, but most people don’t need those.

You don’t need Vonage or any other provider to place a VOIP call. You only need them to connect your call to the PSTN. When VOIP becomes more widely adopted, you won’t need them at all, because your call’s endpoint won’t be on the PSTN. It’s a business model that’ll be doomed by it’s own success.[/quote]

To be honest I actually agree with many of the points you made. Wasn’t it Theodore Roosevelt who once said that “no force is as powerful as an idea whose time has come”. Indeed VOIP is that idea and it’s time has definitely come. However the real issue for businesses migrating to VOIP is the interconnection to the PSTN. Without that interconnection VOIP is nothing but a novelty.

My reason for asking about becoming a VOIP service provider is that I’m part of a small company that provides IT services to small and medium sized businesses, and I’m simply trying to find a why to offer our customers VOIP services - be it directly or through a reseller. The issue I guess is which one offers the better revenue stream.

Cheers, Ian

8

Well, you’re going to have company in that business…

news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050921/ap_ … MlJVRPUCUl

It begins…

9

[quote=“dufus”]Well, you’re going to have company in that business…

news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050921/ap_ … MlJVRPUCUl

It begins…[/quote]

It’s a good thing then that I’m in Australia.

Cheers, Ian

10

Rusty, on the spot. I explored briefly the idea of being a VOIP service provider. But after socializing with some friends, the challenge is
building a business case. It seems to be a volume game and
unless you are a telco or have a strong financial support, it it
difficult to offer pstn provider. For example, the local telco here wants a 50k deposit before they start opening the pipe. Then, they need a minimum monthly minutes committment from you. And that this term is for only 1 operator. We have 3 different operators here.

The other option I looked at is partner with a VOIP provider and offer VOIP
solution i.e., package * and sell to enterprises. The challenge I have is that the * package is not that price atttractive. Maybe someone can help clarify this.

Any thoughts on above?

11

It always depend of your definition of VOIP provider.

I’ll give you an example of what we’re doing in our cie… we provide solution key with voip to our customers, so we build them * box, setup pbx function as what they want, configure phones, etc… then we also offer to group them, depending on their needs we can group them (inter * exchange) for PSTN Lines or reach cities they don’t have branch but an other cie have one. We can also offer them to be simply connect to our * asterisk server (that become a more voip provider way)

The point is, be flexible, offer a wide range of possibilities to your customers, be the turn key solution for them.

To answer your very first question, both ways are correct, and I think having both giving you more flexibilities. But start small, grow as you need, as you sold solutions to your customers.

Cheers !

12

I don’t forsee the falling of VOIP as we know it anytime soon. There are still alot of areas that don’t have broadband options. Some people that have no need for broadband, and therefore will always have a standard phoneline.

It is true that VOIP Providers only translate your VOIP ID to a PSTN line and vise versa. However, that translation will need to be done no matter what.

13

There is of course, another way.

We provide VOIP services to the SMB market. One of the concerns about using the larger VOIP termination providers is that, what happens to our customers numbers if they go bust? Further, businesses are used to paying bills retrospectively. Asking them to pre pay with CC is a turn off.

What we did, was to setup an asterisk server in a data center, hooked up to the internet backbone. We then found a wholesale termination provider and route PSTN calls through them. We buy bulk minutes and allocate to customers as required. We bill the customer.

This model works very well, and has minimal investment.

Further, we have control of the inbound phone numbers.

regards

P.S. Just upgraded to IE 7, and posts don’t word wrap, stick with 6 for as long as u can

14

I am surprised that in the forum that there is No one in the Telco world that answer your question.

I am from Singapore, used to work in one of the largest VoIP company in world, based and listed on Singapore Exchange. Currently, I am in another company doing CallBack Services, ICC. Of course, there is VoIP and PSTN to get the whole work.

In business, there is competitions, so is how creativity and fast that you move ahead of the rest of the pack. End of the day, you still need Telco to link up the calls, but the cost of making the call will come down…and one of these days will be free on mobile to mobile, which is already happened.

So Mr Idtale, if you are keen to know me, Email me the username + hot mail. But one thing for sure, I am not a * user yet. Still trying to explore the beauty of using * to provide Telco grade service. FYI, I am an IT engineer, not a programmer, so alot of things I still depends various party to get the whole “car” running. Cheer.

15

Itdale, you are not completely off the mark, it just takes a couple books worth of details to fill in the blanks. And unless I’m blind, there are no books out there that fill them in. I’ve been working on it a year and a half and guess I have another year to go before I’m done.

The way you are suggesting with DID lines is expensive. You really want to be a CLEC with an interconnection agreement and trunk lines to the ILEC because then the local ILEC has to pay you by the minute for all of the calls from their network you terminate. If you go with DID lines, you are paying them instead. You also need lines to their IXC tandem so your customers can receive conventional long-distance calls. You make even more money on those. This part I’ve completed; I have 10,000 phone numbers and about 2300 customers.

There are services for VoIP providers that will get you the required E911 and Astrisk will support this through a 911 dial plan. You also need to support SS7 because of the number portability requirements (that is, if a customer wants to switch from you to the ILEC but keep the number they got from you then you have to have SS7 to signal that the number is not terminated on your network when someone dials it).

That leaves outgoing calls. There you will need to find a wholesale provider that can give you a flat rate per customer to terminate your outgong calls. I’ve not put that part together yet myself. I’ve heard quotes of $10 per customer unlimited time, but that was a couple years ago. I was told by the same company that once you reach about 2000 customers, you will want to switch to paying by the minute as it will lower your average cost to about $8 per customer. At that point, I would want to put local calls onto the ILEC’s network directly through my interconnection trunk lines as it will be less expensive than paying a wholesale VoIP provider whose per minute cost is much higher. I’ll be looking into this again soon as we look harder at VoIP.

Don’t forget: your state regulates all providers of VoIP and will probably require you become a CLEC before letting you offer service to the public. Some states even require you become a CLEC to resell someone else’s service under you own name.

dufus is off the mark because FCC and state regulation will require a provider to meet the E911 requirements if nothing else. Believe me, you don’t want the legal consequences of not having E911. Do-it-yourselfers who ignore the legal requirements are going to find themselves steeped in law suits. It wouldn’t surprise me if “children’s protective services” could sue a person on behalf of their children for endangerment if they tried to do VoIP without E911.

16

Your much bettoer off using an established provider that ofers a white label program. I have been using Varphonex for a couple years now. They have a good program and you have control of the whole thing.