asterisk users - Sep 2004 - Help setting 2 Offices in US and India

I am new to Asterisk  and VoIP. I have been given the task of setting up a
telephone network in US and India. When customers call the US location, the
calls should route to India (using VoIP) and handle there. The Indian location
should be able to call Us numbers using the Voip to save money. The solution
should be flexible enough to support initial of 5 simultaneous calls with the
option to expand to 20+ within a year.

1) Can anyone direct me what is the minimum hardware needed. (or most
inexpensive solution)

2) If we use dedicated T1 in both location, will the voice quality be good
enough?

3) Can we use Vonage or a company like that for the voip to save on T1 cost?

Thanks for the help,
Mike




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>1) Can anyone direct me what is the minimum hardware needed. (or most
inexpensive solution)
Pentium IV  2.8 Mhz with 1G Ram will be optiomal in perfomace/price relation.

2) If we use dedicated T1 in both location, will the voice quality be
good enough?
That means you connect to office PBX's via T1 interface? Than you need
Digium  T100P Card.
http://www.digitnetworks.com/store/product_info.php?products_id=34
With this configuration you will be able to support 22 simulatanious calls.

3) Can we use Vonage or a company like that for the voip to save on T1 cost?
If you mean savings on international call, the answer is yes. 

Feel free to contact me.

Maxim Litnitsky

----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Ofer Dagan" <odagan@excite.com>
> Subject: [Asterisk-Users] Help setting 2 Offices in US  and India
> To: asterisk-users@lists.digium.com
> Message-ID: <20040903190223.7A3E83955@xprdmailfe9.nwk.excite.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
>
> I am new to Asterisk  and VoIP. I have been given the task of setting up a
telephone network in US and India. When customers call the US location, the
calls should route to India (using VoIP) and handle there. The Indian
location should be able to call Us numbers using the Voip to save money. The
solution should be flexible enough to support initial of 5 simultaneous
calls with the option to expand to 20+ within a year.
>
> 1) Can anyone direct me what is the minimum hardware needed. (or most
inexpensive solution)

the minimum hardware required for any * installation is going to be directly
proportional to your performance expections.  the scenario you are
describing above sounds like you are using this for a mission critical
application and any hardware decisions should be treated as such (read-buy
the most rock solid box that your budget allows)
>
> 2) If we use dedicated T1 in both location, will the voice quality be good
enough?
>
Dedicated to what?  Bandwidth? PSTN connectivity? VoIP is and will always be
as stable as the IP network it is running on.  If you try to run dozens of
customer calls over a 256k DSL across the public internet to your Indian
location where there is a 128k BRI your customers will probably not call you
back.
If you are putting a  T-1 of bandwidth in at each location and have
consistent ping times (the most rudimentary IP packet testing) you could
experiment with sending some test calls between a couple of * boxes and make
the determination that the voice quality is sufficient to subject your
customers to.
> 3) Can we use Vonage or a company like that for the voip to save on T1
cost?

Sure you can.  But again, if this system is mission critical to your company
then buy a PRI/T-1 and get some DID's.  The headaches you get working to
keep your ISVP connections up outweigh the 20% extra operational expense
that leased lines will give you.

Finally, you freely admit that you are new to voip/*.  take care in jumping
headlong into this too quickly.  most of us have spent significant hours in
our 'labs' trying to figure out this stuff.  the wiki has a great
listing of
consultants just waiting to assist you with projects like this (for the
right price).

However you go, good luck


Jason Kawakami
www.optellabs.com

Last month I did precisely that. One of my clients, a big travel agency,
has offices in multiple locations in US and India. Since they handle
large number of incoming calls, I decided to get a PRI in one of the
locations in US. No need of Vonage lines in their case. They have a
private route between Mumbai and DC office, so that phones are on the
same LAN. In one month of operation, never had any problems. Once AT&T's
interent went down for half a day. They were very pleased to find that
their phone calls to main office in USA and India were not affected at
all. There are around 300 calls a day to India. Average load is around
10 calls from PSTN. Occasionally, I see that 16 to 18 lines get busy. We
use G729 only for calls to India

As far as hardware for Asterisk is concerned, I have used Pentium
2.8GHz, 1GB of memory (which is an overkill but memory is cheap), single
T1 card. This machine itself is way underutilized.

Feel free to ask if you have any questions.

-- sudhir

> Message: 2
> Date: Fri,  3 Sep 2004 15:02:23 -0400 (EDT)
> From: "Ofer Dagan" <odagan@excite.com>
> Subject: [Asterisk-Users] Help setting 2 Offices in US  and India
> To: asterisk-users@lists.digium.com
> Message-ID: <20040903190223.7A3E83955@xprdmailfe9.nwk.excite.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
> 
> 
> I am new to Asterisk  and VoIP. I have been given the task of setting up a
telephone network in US and India. When customers call the US location, the
calls should route to India (using VoIP) and handle there. The Indian location
should be able to call Us numbers using the Voip to save money. The solution
should be flexible enough to support initial of 5 simultaneous calls with the
option to expand to 20+ within a year.
> 
> 1) Can anyone direct me what is the minimum hardware needed. (or most
inexpensive solution)
> 
> 2) If we use dedicated T1 in both location, will the voice quality be good
enough?
> 
> 3) Can we use Vonage or a company like that for the voip to save on T1
cost?
> 
> Thanks for the help,
> Mike
> 
>