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

[Jon Carnes]

On Tue, 2006-01-31 at 15:06, Jim Ray wrote:
> it doesn't matter so much that it is hosted or on the premises of the 
> corporate headquarters.  it's the pipe between the two and the latentcy 
> that count.
> 
> jonc wrote:
> 
> >If you are connecting multiple sites then your best bet is to use a
> >hosted provider.
> >
> >
That would be true if the casual business could afford to buy the types
of Softswitches and Border Controllers (Voice Proxy Firewalls) that a
Hosted Provider has in place. 

If he hosted the softswitch and all his sites connected via Speakeasy
then they would sound better - since the traffic would most likely never
leave Speakeasy for the cloud - but they would not have QoS applied for
their traffic (unless they were going directly to Speakeasy's
softswitches), so while the voice would probably sound good it wouldn't
sound as clear as going with a hosted solution.

The best solution (if he hosts the Softswitch directly) is to have a
dedicated line from one ISP that feeds the VoIP traffic to the
softswitch, and then use a separate ISP for internet access. 

We run some Soho clients this way. They have DSL for their data needs
and use TW for their VoIP connections. We do it this way because VoIP
never uses enough bandwidth to cause any restrictions (Bandwidth
queueing that is) on the head cable router - so the latencies stay
within a nice range. 

The latencies on a DSL connection from Bell are very unpredictable -
even when there is no load. Verzion's DSL is generally better. Sprint's
seems to cycle from okay to horrible, leading me to believe that they
have absolutely no management on their network access points. 

Speakeasy does a really good job - much better than TimeWarner.
Unfortunately they aren't available everywhere - and some places where
they have a presence they aren't accepting any new customers - so they
don't overload their networks (what a concept!).

Speaking from the front lines of VoIP,

Jon Carnes
FeatureTel