[c-nsp] voip - build or buy?

[Adam Greene]

As usual, thanks to those who replied on and off-list for the very helpful 
advice, and in some cases, contacts. I will be following up on this during 
the coming days and some of you may be hearing from me!

Thanks again,
Adam

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Anton Kapela" <tk at 5ninesdata.com>
To: "Adam Greene" <maillist at webjogger.net>; <cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net>
Sent: Wednesday, December 27, 2006 7:15 PM
Subject: RE: [c-nsp] voip - build or buy?




> simply reselling. Is VoIP extraordinarily complex to deploy
> from an operational standpoint?

Not too complex, but get yourself familiar with all manner of queuing
controls, layer 2 CoS, and diffserve. If you're planning or hoping to
use voip in the wide area, then these issues become extended to all of
the CPE hardware in the data path. Budget several hundred hours just to
'vet' all your vendors equipment end-to-end on paper & for actual field
tests.

> Is there anything that one
> stands to gain by "doing it oneself" that one couldn't gain
> by hooking up with someone who's already doing it?

Typically a company would do this to gain margin, but the volumes of
minutes and the number of handsets you roll out needs to scale up
quickly to offset the obviously high startup and development costs. Very
minimally, you'd do this for the reasons you run an ISP instead of just
reselling colo inside Equinix and buy cogent transit and IP space
directly; because you stand more to gain from the available margin by
frontloading all the things that go with running an ISP. But just like a
'startup' ISP with no funding, it could make more sense to resell
someone else's hosted voip phones and services to build up a customer
base, later transitioning (hopefully you've structured things to make
this easy..) to your own platform.

But please note there's a lot more to being a 'voip' provider than
installing asterisk and ebaying a 5350. You get to implement your own
billing system now! You also get to track international LD rates, which
can often change more frequently than you expect. If you're using PRI's
from some $local_clec, you need to ensure they're publishing TLR's
(tennant location registry/register) per-customer-ani, so that you're
compliant with e911 requirements. In many cases a carrier will publish
TLR's only for the customer on record, not customers of their customers
(i.e. _you_ buy the PRI and the did's/anis from them, not your end
users!). Not dealing with this up front will create problems for you in
the long run. You also get to deal with porting and managing porting of
numbers for customers. You get to deal with any application issues (i.e.
not everyone does t.38 fax at all and many do it wrong) that come your
way. You also get to train your staff in the ways of debuging and
tracking down voice quality issues, which might not be something
everyone is ready to learn.

These problems parallel the same ones any startup business might face in
any business area. Figure out where your company can afford to start;
ie. how much you're willing to invest in creating, testing, marketing,
and deploying this new product vs. getting into bed with a partner to
resell. Once this is known, the decision should be clear.

-Tk