North America SIP providers - who are the best?

[Aaron Rosenthal]

I'd like to start a discussion on the topic of SIP service providers.
As many of you know Asterisk is SIP native and can provide a SIP end-to-end solution. The question is, who has the best nationwide fully meshed SIP network? I'm not talking about Joe Schmoe service provider who is co-located in some data center offering SIP over the internet.... I'm talking about legit telecommunication carriers.
When we first started deploying SIP to clients with multiple sites, we used PAETEC who has a SIP product called iPath. It's a great product but like all carriers, PAETEC isn't perfect.

Which nationwide SIP service providers have you used?
What was your experience with them and why did you choose that particular provider?
Most carriers are still trying to roll out their SIP products so I'm sure the whole community here would also love to hear about progress in SIP by certain carriers.

[Lester Vecsey]

One thing I'm concernced about is quality of service (linux kernel firewall settings, see voip-info.org), particularly for 64kbit/s ulaw channels which tend to consume bandwidth very quickly. Its one thing to create graphs of active asterisk channels in a monitoring package like Cacti, but the next step is probably to have a detailed graph showing the arrival of voice packets and their extents so you can see if there really is a reason to be concerned about voice breaking up. This would seem to be a key component for evaluating various sip providers.

Asterisk, and maybe older equipment like 3com/USRobotics total control units might be able to be retrofitted so that SIP providers could focus on a local area: they receive calls through the internet, and call out on local PRI lines. There still is a cost savings for them to do so, right?

[J. Oquendo]

What's going on Aaron. Well some of the carriers I use are Paetec, Covad (VoATM T's), Verizon, just about anyone and everyone. Paetec has been problematic for me in the North East but I have to add their Florida group rocks. Since I do PSTN termination, sell VoIP trunks, managed VoIPBX's, etc., I'm really not working at a provider in fact we do provider services but more providers do their trunks with us. Not everyone can afford an SBC let alone manage one.

My current infrastructure consists of Audiocodes' Netrake, Foundry Switches, Cisco routers, Asterisk, PBXnSIP, too much to list. Our in house managed services consists of Asterisk and PBXnSIP. PBXnSIP we started deploying to client locations and we manage them remotely.

I set up the following in Boston last week. (SoHo financial company) 20+ phones on site (Snom 320's and 360's). PBXnSIP, Covad VoATM. Remote users mixed 360's and Snom softphones. I did the following as the client provided their own PoE switch:

My end
Cisco 1841 router --> dumb switch --> PBXnSIP WAN port --> 3com PoE (client provided)

Their end
Cisco 17xx? --> Sonicwall VPN --> 3com --> Windows DHCP server --> Phones --> PC's
|
\-------> PBXnSIP LAN

I did some voodoo VLAN work/routing to get it running correctly. Phones internally register to a 192 address with a public IP failover. A third failover comes via my internals. Their PBXnSIP I have trunked on my SBC via VPN on the Cisco router. I have OpenSER running checking numbers for least cost routing since I use three carriers, Level3, Global Crossing and Verizon. This is how I can guarantee cheap rates for clients.

Anyway this was last week. Next month I have a Fortune 500. DS3, 300+ phones, 150 or so remote clients. I have created trunks via my SBC to Asterisk as a B2BUA which is actually passing it back to PBXnSIP in order to pass it to Lucent internally. They already have an expensive Lucent PBX they don't want to do away with so we're doing interop testing to get it running. We can make calls internally extension to extension from my office to theirs, however, they have group voicemail capabilities they want to keep. So its on us to interact nicely with their Avaya. ;)

Configuration of the year... University ... 2500+ extensions. 3 Asterisk Servers, Rhino channels banks and Adtrans. Their phones are mixed Polycoms, Snom's and ATA's. We had a field day getting the elevator system working correctly. (Push button to reach 911). We a work in extensions.conf-fu My favorite so far... Setting up an emergency system (school shootings) where everyone gets a ring. Tried and tested on all extensions. Caller makes a recording, caller has option to change, delete, etc., once done, callfile is made using a System(run/my/script) and everyone is alerted.

Asterisk is fun but sometimes it gets to be too much. I wish someone would create a nice open source method of allowing management for the "uninformed" of their PBX. All offerings I've seen so far stink. This is the only thing I like about PBXnSIP over Asterisk.

Pictures of my Rhino's and Adtrans @ the school.
http://www.infiltrated.net/rhinos.jpg

Anyway, I dislike naming where I work since I do a lot of managed security services, penetration testing, etc., I sort of am the closest thing to a CSO at my company so security is first, Asterisk/VoIP is second. So if you were to ask me about carriers, I could throw out names of people who resell for us, and who use our backend and your jaw would likely drop ;)

J. Oquendo / sil

[Lance Koster]

Wow you are asking for the secret recipe. But no problem there, I personally have been through many painful interconnection agreements with many different providers. Aaron unfortunately I have not found a solid solution from any one single provider. I have created a great network of providers and not so simply route all traffic using asterisk. To name a few I use Verizon, Paetec, Time Warner, Broadvox, Bandwidth, AT&T. I would be glad to have a voice call with you to explain all the pro’s and con’s of each. My company is licensed and regulated alternative access carrier. All my SIP customers will always benefit, If outbound calls via Verizon are better then AT&T at 3:00 then there calls are routed accordingly, if 30 seconds later US-Lec is the better choice calls are routed. Each provider has pro’s and con’s and they change like the stock market. I have learned today there is no single solution provider. Yet I am on the verge of creating one because of this mess. Again I am licensed VoIP provider for the past 5 years and unfortunately that is very old for the VoIP world. Actually going on year 7, licensed for 5. So I personally would classify my company www.yoursip.com as the best provider for North America, simply because when you are a customer of mine, you are a customer of the best of the best VoIP networks the planet has to offer. I also have a PSTN switch in each of my data centers, most of my outbound calls are still terminated via the PSTN, until they have sorted all these nightmares with 911 and a plethora of other issues.

Not sure if I answered your question, but hope it helps.

Lance

[Geoff Love]

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[Keith Masavage]

I am interested in this topic as well. As a consultant in a variety of disciplines, I often do work in telephony, especially as it relates to VoIP. In addition to the overall SIP topic, I would be interested in what others have to say about companies like Interactive Intelligence ( http://www.inin.com )
and how their call center and VoIP solutions conform to SIP standards. There appears to be a lot of confusion about SIP, SIP Service providers, QOS, and a number of SIP related topics that I'd love to hear about.

Keith Masavage

[Aaron]

Keith,
Agreed, there's still LOTS of confusion about SIP and much of it comes from the fact that A) it's become more of a marketing term and people often fail to really understand what the technology is and B) the market is being saturated with SIP providers who have sub-par networks. I've been working with about a dozen different SIP providers of all types, drop me a line if you'd like to discuss - I'm on LinkedIn.
Cheers,
Aaron Rosenthal