Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Specialty Hosting and Markets : VOIP etc : setting up voip business

[CymraegWalesHosting]

Hi, im looking at setting up a voip business and need some advice from people.
Im looking at the best software to use for this.
Im currently using Freepbx and that seems to be working ok, but i would like something maybe a little more powerful and contains advance billing.
What type of stuff is out there?
Best,
Nathaniel

[gate2vn]

I have some customers utilizing asterisk/freepbx but for real voip, you might want to consider better platform from Cisco.

[SysAdminMan]

If you're looking for a billing application for Asterisk then a2billing (http://www.asterisk2billing.org/cgi-bin/trac.cgi) is pretty good. Certainly not perfect but it works well and is still being developed.

[kris1351]

This isn't really the best place to ask VoIP advice honestly. There are some VoIP only boards out there that can help you. Honestly though to offer real VoIP service to customers on a professional level you are going to use a real product and not one of the cookie cutter ones out there.

[sgth]

What type of VOIP business you want to provide? Pinless / Calling card for end-user or call forwarding , pbx for small business.
Asterisk / FreePBX / you can use for small , medium size office but if you want to provide something like Pinless or Calling card then you need a gateway + radius for billing.

The prices on some of the VoIP providers looked pretty cheap, should compare with them

VoIP isnt that expensive you should have some good luck finding it.

[PropspinMike]

on a side note, I've always been interested in finding out how to get info on the actual backend connections some voip providers use, such as the wholesale providers they use.. I've seen a few wholesale companies out there, but their rates are nowhere near as low as my two current providers, so there must be a step missing..

[sgth]

grey route would be cheapest but you will facing up and down network. Depend on your market, you can look in to direct white route

[Rob2001]

How many SIP lines do you have?

[stacman]

we are integrating our system with voip and this is fairly new to us though I can say we are on track. try to search with other voip specific forums to see what best fits your needs

[ghost3]

4psa has an interesting product called VoipNow. We have a full in house VoIP system and a MetaSwitch, but we're running the VoipNow in tests and it looks pretty interesting. We don't have it in production yet, so I can't promise anything there. I can confirm that running VoIP on VPS isn't a good idea yet because of the timing issues.

[SysAdminMan]

It's certainly possible to run voip/asterisk on a VPS, I know many people that do - myself included :-)
Obviously you're not going to want to have 150 concurrent calls going on a VPS, but used in the right situation it can work well.

[ghost3]

Actually, sorry, yes, I agree. In certain limited circumstances it will work, but I wouldn't recommend it as something to base a business on.

[ydonchenko]

If you wanna fail down on a road stick to Asterisk etc open source software! if you wanna be successful you will need to spend some money on real hardware/software
the start up coast of telecome just on right hardware can easy be over $5mills.
The right way to go is to get the following stuff.
- the world-class Sylantro IP PBX or BroadWorks softswitch
- Genband (formerly NexTone) and Acme SBC’s for line-side and trunk-side interconnects
- Iperia VM (for IVR, VM, UM etc...)
- Cisco AS5400 Series Universal Gateway (for TDM circuits)
- Rodopi Automated Provisioning and Billing System
and for redundancy i would recommend to have at least a two facilities and latency between them not more then 20 ms, if it would be longer you could have problems during failover, and you should run for sure your OWN BGP.
So what you should do?
Option #1 play around with asterisk, freeswitch etc... then fail
Option #2 become a some ones reseller
Option #3 find an investors for this, but in now days this is not easy at all.
also please note the biggest expense you would have in this operation is your Cisco Admins ;-) believe me from my experience.