[TriLUG] Site to Site VPN over the net? Good enough for VoIP?

[Ron Joffe]

On Tuesday 31 January 2006 08:54, Chad Thomsen wrote:
> Was wondering if anybody is doing this successfully at there BUSINESS (not
> looking at home usage).  I have a 7 site network and was thinking about
> converting from ITC Deltacom frame to speakeasy.net DSL (since they offer a
> CIR like service) but was wondering if very many folks have been successful
> with it.  BIG question is performance.  What happens if the traffic on the
> internet backbone is really heavy?  Would it not effect the performance of
> the VoIP?  Speakeasy.net can gaurantee minimum bandwidth to and form the
> "intenet cloud" from each location but once traffic is traveling accross
> that cloud you are at the mercy of the internet backbone.
>
Chad,

We have three offices set up in Oregon and North Carolina. These are one man 
home offices for a small consulting firm. We have been successfully using 
VOIP for 5+ years. One office is RR Commercial, one is RR Residential, and 
the third is DSL.

We have had a number of different solutions over the years. Point to Point 
SIP, Asterisk with server at one location, and remote SIP clients registering 
to that Asterisk Server, Asterisk - Asterisk server communications.

In addition we all have VOIP - PSTN gateways (Vonage, FWD, etc). There are 
VPN's point to point using dedicated VPN Gateways between the offices.

I would have to say that the overall quality of VOIP internally (office to 
office over VPN) has been of a better quality then the VOIP-PSTN (Vonage, 
etc).

That is our experience with a set of small (one man) offices.

Ron