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VOIP Info |
Shopping for VoIP gear is a lot more fun than it used to be. Now you can get prefab servers and bundles with everything you need, and all you do is plug things in and start yakking. OK, so it's not quite that easy, but the progress in the past couple of years in user-friendliness has been phenomenal. Comparison shopping is easier than ever, so today we're going to do a bit of price and feature comparisons on some of the vendors we know and love so well—and see if we can't figure out who offers the best value. (Note to miserly PHBs: cost and value are not the same things.)
The majority of them are based on Digium's Asterisk, so we'll compare how well the progenitor stands up to its offspring.
Just to keep it simple, we'll pretend we're a smallish office with up to 50 talkative users.
When I was researching this, I kept bumping into some serious acronym infestations, such as "How can Cisco CPE PPPoE MTU size adapt to MRU of LNS?" While all of those are interesting in their own way, the one that really matters to the IT decision maker is CPE, which means "customer premise equipment." Vendors fling that one around like rodeo queens flinging candy in a parade. The rest of the quotation means "We are mysterious so we can charge you more."
I'm going to compare products from Digium, Switchvox, Bluesocket, Fonality, Rhino, and any others that grab my fancy. In addition to the for-purchase products we'll be looking at, many of these also offer free-of-cost community-supported editions—which are great for test-drives and hardy do-it-yourselfers. Prices may vary from what I've found, depending on who you purchase from and how good you are at negotiating sweet deals.
Gold and Platinum subscriptions are available at additional cost. An extra $220 buys Gold, and a cool $660 elevates your status to Platinum. These give you phone support, a package of Incidents Per Year (which normally cost $200 each) next-day replacement, and training discounts.
If you want POTS (plain old telephone system) analog phone or trunk integration, it holds up to 8 FXS/FXO ports in banks of four. So you can have four of each, or all of one or the other, at about $100 per port. It supports both SIP (session initiation protocol) and IAX (Digium's own VoIP protocol, Inter-Asterisk Exchange). The Asterisk Appliance does not support T1/E1 interfaces.
The box is cute, energy-thrifty, and has a small footprint, but it won't fit in a standard rack. It runs a slimmed-down, streamlined embedded Linux-based operating system, but it still seems underpowered compared to other VoIP appliances, and a single gigabyte for data storage seems meager.
Digium licenses its Asterisk code two different ways: under the GPL, which allows anyone to modify and re-distribute Asterisk code and its descendants, and also under a commercial license that permits closed-source development. Switchvox was originally closed-source, but Digium plans to open-source it.
Digium sells Switchvox appliances in two classes: SOHO and SMB. Since we are a fictional small office, we'll look at the base AA60 SOHO unit, which starts at $1595.00. This is not a rackmount, but a small unit that goes on a desk or wall mount.
There are a number of add-ons to choose from, such as a cold-spare failover unit, extended hardware warranty, and discounted hard phones. You can mix-and-match FXS/FXO ports however you like at about $100 to $160 per port, depending on how many you buy. T1/E1 goes for $664.00. So why does this cost so much more than the Asterisk Appliance, and seemingly do less? Because it's a big waddling fully-featured Asterisk server, not just a SIP + IAX server.
Come back next week for more VoIP power shopping.
VoIPowering Your Office: VoIP Appliance Power-Shopping, part 2Last week we compared Asterisk and its new corporate sibling, Switchvox, which is really its offspring. Today we're adding VoIP servers for our mythical 50-user office from Pingtel and Fonality.
The lowest-end Pingtel appliance is the SIPxchange ECS SE. This goes for $2,945.00, and for this you get:
If you need PSTN integration you'll need a media gateway, and you can choose from a range of certified devices. These cost from $234.95 for a two-port FXS gateway (for two incoming analog phone lines) to a T1/E1 gateway for $4,550. Another T1/E1 option is to have the Audiocodes TP260 PCI T1/E1 gateway card installed in your SIPxchange server. I forgot to get a price for one of these, but typically they're around $3,000 for single-span. Before you keel over from price shock, this is not a mere T1/E1 interface, which typically cost well under $1,000. This is a complete media gateway that, just like the standalone units, supports faxing, echo cancellation and jitter buffer, tone detection and generation, PSTN signaling, embedded Web server to power the management interface, and multiple VoIP codecs and protocols. Having your media gateway incorporated into your server saves a bit of space and cabling, though it puts a bit more load on your server. A standalone gateway offloads some of the work and gives you more flexibility.
Pingtel will also sell you, as part of their certified hardware line, an Ingate SIP capable firewall. These range from about $3,700 to just under $5,000.
Pingtel offers certified hardware packages and a rather bewildering array of individual support options. They also offer all-in-one support deals that cover your entire system- phones, servers, gateways, the works.
Next up the ladder is the RBS (standard) series, which come with 2GB RAM and dual 160GB SATA hard drives in a RAID 1 configuration. The base unit is about $1,400.
Finally, for just under $2,000, the PhoneBochs RBP (premium) has 2GB RAM and dual 1TB SATA hard drives. That's right, a whopping terabyte per drive, in RAID 1. (Who else is old enough to remember when 100 megabyte hard drives were standard, and cost about $125, back when $125 was a lot bigger than it is now?)
RockBochs uses only Sangoma interfaces, which are the best of all. All three base models have two full-length PCI slots for expansion, and can accommodate up to eight FXO ports or two T1/E1. Adding four FXO ports with hardware echo cancellation adds roughly $800, while eight ports gets you a volume deal at about $1,000. One T1 adds about a thousand dollars, while two cost about $1,600 extra.
Support options are the simplest of all. You can purchase support in either 1-hour increments at $99.00 per hour, or 5-hour blocks for $396.00. They will help you with anything, including remote helpdesk via Web or SSH.
Next week we're going to look at Fonality's PBXtra, which seems to be in direct competition with its corporate twin, trixbox Pro, and a mystery guest that I'll choose between now and then.
From wired to wireless, you have more ways than ever to make a low-cost or free call using voice over IP. The industry group Wi-Fi Alliance has announced a certification program this week for "Voice Over Wi-Fi." The program will test the interoperability of devices as well their performance in making calls. Products that pass receive a Wi-Fi Certified Voice Personal certification.
(Just to clarify, VoIP over mobile phones has grown rapidly over the past 18 months, but two distinct networking technologies are at work here: wide-area cellular data networks and wireless local-area networks (WLANs or Wi-Fi networks). Voice over Wi-Fi—also known as VoFi—requires a phone with WLAN technology built in. While there are a few Wi-Fi-only phones, the trend is toward dual-mode mobile phones, which sport both cellular and Wi-Fi networking capabilities)
"We work with many of the key companies before some of these products are commercially available to get them certified," Edgar Figueroa, executive director of the Wi-Fi Alliance, told our sister website InternetNews.com. "There are some converged phones that will be announced shortly that have already received the Voice-Personal certification."
A number of router and access point devices have also received early certification, including products from Broadcom, Cisco Systems, Intel, Meru Networks, and Redpine.
While VoIP calls sometimes lack the quality and consistency of landline calls, Figueroa said the Voice-Personal certification process is designed to minimize such issues. Among its battery of tests, the Alliance tests for key metrics related to voice quality: packet loss, latency, and jitter, he said. Certified products will consistently prioritize voice communications over data, or multimedia traffic.
"If the jitter is more than 50 milliseconds or changes and jumps around, that's not acceptable," Figueroa said. "And no more than 1 percent packet loss. Any device that fails these tests is unacceptable."
The availability of Wi-Fi access points (network nodes) has been growing rapidly for several years. ABI Research reported this week that shipments of consumer-oriented 802.11n Wi-Fi access points are expected to see a dramatic increase over the next five years, rising from just 6 million this year to a forecast 88 million in 2013.
Another research firm confirms rapid growth for converged devices. "We are seeing increasing expectations from wireless subscribers that handsets include Wi-Fi technology to handle both voice and data, and carriers are responding in kind with an interesting array of offerings combining Wi-Fi and cellular service," said Victoria Fodale, manager of market data/intelligence for In-Stat, in a statement.
"Delivering a high-quality user experience with Voice over Wi-Fi will be critical to the success of converged service offerings, so the Wi-Fi Certified Voice-Personal testing program is an important step for the industry," she said.
Adapted from a story first published on internetnews.com
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