Hi All: I'd like to test a pure VoIP call center set up under Asterisk, Can I use existing IP routers to get VoIP traffic from service provider to Asterisk with good quality of voice? In other words, do I have to do any hardware upgrade to make VoIP work in existing enterprise environement, we have 10g Ethernet LAN? Many thanks, Tielin
James Fogg
2005-Aug-24 10:03 UTC
[Asterisk-Users] Can exsiting router handle VoIP traffic?
> I'd like to test a pure VoIP call center set up under > Asterisk, Can I use existing IP routers to get VoIP traffic > from service provider to Asterisk with good quality of voice? > In other words, do I have to do any hardware upgrade to make > VoIP work in existing enterprise environement, we have 10g > Ethernet LAN?A router is a router and IP is IP. Any router can route VoIP. The issue you might run into is QoS. If your WAN link is busy your voice will need to be protected somehow, and QoS is the current best method. Most routers, other than "home network" routers like Linksys, support QoS.
Colin Anderson
2005-Aug-24 10:21 UTC
[Asterisk-Users] Can exsiting router handle VoIP traffic?
Short answer: Yes. It's just data. Long answer: In your LAN: Usually depends on the nature of the "other" data on your LAN. If you LAN has a ton of traffic you will have to use something like QoS tagging to ensure that your voice traffic is prioritized. Any decent switch supports this tagging and / or will retransmit frames "as-recieved". In a lot of call centres you might see the agents using telnet sessions or a web based CRM which is lightweight traffic - wise and won't interfere with VoIP even without QoS, except in extreme cases where you have thousands of users in multiple subnets with single bottlenecks like everyone hitting the same server. On the Internet: Because the Internet is "best effort" by design there's no guarantee that packets will be delivered in-order, out-of-order, or even at all. Any quality of service tagging you do on your end is largely a pointless exercise because intermediate routers between you and your service provider will not honor the tag. As well, an inherent risk for a pure VoIP setup on the Internet is DoS'ing - a single script kiddie can make your day bad. Consider what would happen to your call centre should another Code Red day happen. You have to make a business decision as to whether the cost savings and flexibility that a pure VoIP setup would give you vs the risk of the call centre being without service for X amount of hours because of Internet problems. You may want to consider a hybrid approach, where you under-provision a PSTN connection such as a PRI (say, a single PRI for a couple of hundred users) and have calls overflow to a VoIP provider once the channel limit is reached. This way, you can take advantage of some of the cost savings and flexibility of VoIP and you have a backup that automatically kicks in should your Internet connection or VoIP provider goes down. If this happens, your capacity to process calls is diminished, but not completely toast. It's nice in Asterisk, because you *can* do this as opposed to a lot of other PBX'es where it's their way or the highway. One last thing to consider: I see that you work for Nintendo. It's my understanding that the latest Ethereal builds can identify and decode SIP and IAX packets to audio. What would Nintendo's feelings be on call centre data being transmitted on the Internet where it would be possible to intercept and decode this data. What would the legal and / or corporate ramifications be if this did happen? You can argue that this kind of thing can happen with a PSTN connection, however, that requires physical proximity and access to the line itself, which you control. In a VoIP scenario, once the packets traverse your firewall and get onto the Internet, they are essentially public property. hth -----Original Message----- From: Tielin Xu [mailto:TIELXU01@noa.nintendo.com] Sent: Wednesday, August 24, 2005 10:22 AM To: asterisk-users@lists.digium.com Subject: [Asterisk-Users] Can exsiting router handle VoIP traffic? Hi All: I'd like to test a pure VoIP call center set up under Asterisk, Can I use existing IP routers to get VoIP traffic from service provider to Asterisk with good quality of voice? In other words, do I have to do any hardware upgrade to make VoIP work in existing enterprise environement, we have 10g Ethernet LAN? Many thanks, Tielin _______________________________________________ Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users