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Fixed Wireless Technology

WISPs Face a VoIP Decision

WISPs need to decide early on whether they want to learn how VoIP works or hire an expert to do the system for them. Not doing VoIP is not an option.

[October 3, 2006]

On the ISP-Wireless list in July, BL asked:

We are a small WISP and would like to provide our customers with VoIP service, however we don't want to invest the money in a VoIP switch and all of that mess. Can you make some recommendations on who we might need to look at partnering with? I'd like for the service to be branded by us, but not have to agree to any massive customer commitment levels and I'd like to make a decent amount of revenue from this venture. It seems like I'm asking for a lot, but I'm hoping that someone out there knows where I can find this.

We asked:

How many people on the list are working with Call Wave, MegaPOP, or CommPartners?

[DB said] "We've had pretty good success with Nuvio. Getting started with them was very easy and we make decent margins for not having to do much. They also have a pretty nice feature rich hosted PBX product."

[AS wrote] "I'm using DATAPROTEC and Maxiweb here in Brazil."

[JO replied] "We do CommPartners but are migrating to an in-house Asterisk based solution."

[LZ warned] "We were with CP as well and rolled our own as well. Asterisk is great for small amount of lines; it gets bogged down easily with a lot of lines."

[RD suggested] "Can't speak for doing actual POTS lines off of the Asterisk box, but if you're doing purely SIP to SIP handoff, your box will be doing almost no work. We use that setup here with great success."

[JO agreed] "That is what we do. All ATAs for analog gear and SIP to our providers. We have no analog or TDM gear in our Asterisk boxes."

[JA asked] "Who are you using as a SIP provider?"

[RD replied] "We use PacWest Telecomm."

CB, who sells Telemedium, liked Asterisk but raised some other issues:

That is the problem we've seen with the Asterisk solutions. It has many scalability problems. Mostly due to it's config file driven system. I know it uses a database setup now but it has carried over its config files setup to the new database. We did not like the security vulnerabilities either. After three years of development, our custom solution works much better without these draw backs! Now we can white label it for others use, so why re-invent the wheel, build the infrastructure for it and have to support it?

[BN agreed] "We're not offering VoIP to customers (yet), but utilize Asterisk for a business complex. I've found it to be a stable, extremely feature-rich, and scalable solution. The number of security vulnerabilities have been in line with any product of this scale. The config files can be made friendlier through the use of includes, etc. What level of customization can your customers achieve with your solution? How are those things handled?"

RD recommended doing it yourself:

And it's definitely not hard to migrate from the text-file based configuration system to the database-backed one.

The configuration process is by no means polished, but has the added benefit of you generally get a better understanding of things if you manage to get 'em working :)

sip.conf and voicemail are nice to have in the realtime DB system.

[We concluded] "Most ISPs I talk to that are implementing Asterisk do it in their own offices first, before offering it to customers."

—End