asterisk users - Mar 2003 - ITSP requested features?

[Resent, since I accidentally sent from an unsubscribed address.]

I hope nobody minds if I do a bit of market research with the members of 
this list.  :-)

I'm currently working with a company that's looking into providing a 
VoIP-to-PSTN service for consumers, similar to Vonage and Iconnect.  
Because we realize that technically-minded folks are a very important 
market, we would try to provide features (and eliminate restrictions) to 
appeal to individuals and businesses interested in implementing more 
complex PBX systems than a single analog phone hooked to an ATA.

So the real question is, what do you want from your ITSP?  There are some
obvious answers, such as not requiring use of a closed hardware device
(like Vonage does) and allowing multiple simultaneous calls.

What else appeals to you?  Voicemail delivery via SMTP?  Automatic call
forwarding to a PSTN number when your SIP client isn't registered?  Call
record billing statements with custom accounting codes?  IAX protocol
support?  911 emergency call routing?  Unlimited international calls?  
Free car wash with fill-up?  Which of these might be important to you?

I can't make any promises about which features we adopt or whether we even
end up deciding to provide service at all, but your input would be
valuable to us and hopefully improve your telephone service in the future!

Thanks in advance for any suggestions or comments.  -Nathan

-- 
*** Help filter spam!  PGP-sign your email.
*** Expand your PGP Web of Trust with http://www.biglumber.com/
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 232 bytes
Desc: not available
Url :
http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-users/attachments/20030316/0d617c50/attachment.pgp

Nathan Lutchansky wrote:> [Resent, since I accidentally sent from an 
unsubscribed address.]
> 
> I hope nobody minds if I do a bit of market research with the members of 
> this list.  :-)
> 
> I'm currently working with a company that's looking into providing
a
> VoIP-to-PSTN service for consumers, similar to Vonage and Iconnect.  
> Because we realize that technically-minded folks are a very important 
> market, we would try to provide features (and eliminate restrictions) to 
> appeal to individuals and businesses interested in implementing more 
> complex PBX systems than a single analog phone hooked to an ATA.
> 
> So the real question is, what do you want from your ITSP?  There are some
> obvious answers, such as not requiring use of a closed hardware device
> (like Vonage does) and allowing multiple simultaneous calls.
> 
*FAR* more than anything else from my perspective would be the ease of 
access to technical support, and an audit-trail type accounting for 
trouble tickets.

Right behind that would be true integrated support for people behind NAT 
gateways.  Iconnecthere claims such, but the problems I'm having don't 
seem to be widely shared, and I seem to be one of the few who is using 
it entirely behind NAT.

IMO all the voicemail systems, Vonage, asterisk, iconnecthere, etc., 
leave quite a bit to be desired in terms of ease of message 
manipulation.  So there is some room to differentiate there, too.

B.

At 01:58 PM 3/16/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>What else appeals to you?  Voicemail delivery via SMTP?
Yes, but most pbx users will most likely be doing this on their own, so I 
don't know how important it is.

>Automatic call
>forwarding to a PSTN number when your SIP client isn't registered?
Sure, but again, how many PBXs go down for long periods of time? Generally 
that type of routing would be done with an extensions.conf, even though 
it's inefficient to take the stream in, and route it back again. .

>  Call
>record billing statements with custom accounting codes?
Nah, in the pbx. .

>  IAX protocol
>support?
Yep. IAX2 preferably.

>911 emergency call routing?  Unlimited international calls?
Unlimited International would be nice, though I don't know how economical 
it would be.  How about unlimited to certain countries ..

Keep in mind, you're not the only kid on the block .. lots of people 
already working to implement IAX support, so you'll need something unique - 
whether it be price or unlimited international, etc.

denon

NOTICE[40966]: File chan_sip.c, Line 1559 (copy_header): No field
'Record-Route' present to copy
NOTICE[40966]: File chan_sip.c, Line 1559 (copy_header): No field
'Record-Route' present to copy

Thx.

Bill

So far, the overwhelming majority of comments both on and off the list 
seem to indicate that the most requested feature is reliability.  No 
surprise there.  :-)

I understand that many folks are frustrated with the lack of technical
support and help for power users being offered by existing providers, so I
can see that any ITSP needs to have a better support system than what's
currently offered.  I believe that one of the problems with the ITSP
market is that the primary selling point for VoIP is the price advantage
over traditional LD providers, so the meager revenue stream just can't
support paying for techs to work on the problems encountered by 10% of the
users.  Nevertheless, providing technical details about the ITSP's system
and maybe a public forum for users to help one another would be an
efficient, low-cost means of helping the situation.

Other common requests were IAX/IAX2 support, acceptance of 
freely-available codecs, and increasing the possible number of concurrent 
calls.  The latter request may take some creative pricing, however, since 
several of the comments were along the lines of, "I bought ten gazillion 
prepaid minutes from iConnect and then discovered I couldn't share them 
with all my friends!"

Thank you to those who have offered suggestions.  If anybody has further 
comments, please feel free to send me an email.  -Nathan

-- 
*** Help filter spam!  PGP-sign your email.
*** Expand your PGP Web of Trust with http://www.biglumber.com/
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 232 bytes
Desc: not available
Url :
http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-users/attachments/20030318/a92e3152/attachment.pgp