Welcome to VoIP! The importance of the role an SBC plays in a VOIP topology is somewhat based on what type of VoIP service you're offering. If you're basically providing a last-mile POTS service from a CO in your region of interest and then trunking to a VoIP provider for off-net access you could somewhat justify against purchasing an SBC and setting up properly configuring access lists on your IP edge (you should also ensure whatever core/edge Ethernet/IP routers/switches are capable of handling the throughput you require). However if you're providing phone service over the public internet using IADs/ATA/IP Phones then you will absolutely want to look into SBC options as they provide various important functions such as NAT traversal and load shedding/DOS protection which is important when opening any type of interface to the public internet. Whether you go with commercial hardware/software solution or go with open source should be based on cost and support. If you are unfamiliar with VoIP it may be a better path of approach to go with commercial vendors since they can provide you with support where required rather than having to dig through various mailing lists and debugging exercises to narrow down what may or may not be a bug in the end. In contrast, if you want to implement new functionality, with some talented programmers you can do so yourself with open source solutions vs. going through long and drawn out battles/cordial discussions with vendors to get them to implement some functionality you may find useful or novel. Regards, Justin Randall Team Leader - VoIP Engineering Comwave Telecom Inc. From: voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org [mailto:voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org] On Behalf Of Jonathan Jones Sent: June-21-10 1:56 PM To: Matthew S. Crocker Cc: voiceops at voiceops.org Subject: Re: [VoiceOps] New to VoIP On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 1:38 PM, Matthew S. Crocker <matthew at corp.crocker.com> wrote: Everything is software, a 'Session Border Controller' is software. All software needs some hardware to run on. You can get a SBC that runs on Linux/PC server based hardware or you can get a SBC that runs on dedicated hardware. Your softswitch is going to need several servers to run on as well. The smallest Broasoft/Broadworks implementation is 2 servers for the softswitch running virtual servers and 2 SBC (Acme Packet). You can't get into that type of a setup anywhere near $50,000 though. For 2000 subscribers I would highly recommend you partner with an existing VoIP provider and resell their service. They can handle all of the VoIP heavy lifting and send you the Call Detail Records which you can then use to bill. If you want to do it yourself you'll probably have to live in the open source world to keep below the $50,000 limit. Thanks, I had been looking at the softswitch software route and had been quoted a price of $12,288.00 for 1024 simultaneous calls. So I figure $20k more or less for a softswitch that would do 2000 concurrencies, another $10k in hardware. Am I too naive to want a software based solution to perform least cost routing, billing, perhaps calling cards, etc. I've been looking into either Asterisk or Callweaver, OpenSIPS and Soft-Switch.org for signaling. Am I again, naive or can it be done. If not I don't want to waste my time nor money especially if I can do it the right way.