Hi, What's your experience with offering VOIP to business customers in a Bring Your Own Bandwidth/Network environment? It's one thing to run VOIP over a qos-enabled network with a known bandwidth and gear that you control, and quite another to run VOIP over whatever network the customer wants to buy and whatever random gear was on sale at OfficeMax. Have you run VOIP over both types of networks? Thanks, David
Quite a few of our customers run on Qwest DSL or Mediacom Cable connections. Most of those are very small businesses with just one to ten lines or so. We just inform them of bandwidth requirements (including upload of course) and recommend settings where we can, but so far we really haven't had complaints. We may be lucky though. We did have one genius that thought it was a good idea to be behind a sonicwall and then an actual 10Mb HUB before splitting to their entire network and an Adtran TA912. They were actually one of the "larger" customers. They kept complaining of quality issues and swore they had a switch until we actually went onsite to look for ourselves. ---- Brandon Buckner Switching Technician / VoIP Admin Iowa Network Services brandonb at netins.com -----Original Message----- From: voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org [mailto:voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org] On Behalf Of David Hiers Sent: Friday, October 30, 2009 10:59 AM To: VoiceOps at voiceops.org Subject: [VoiceOps] Bring Your Own Bandwidth/Network Hi, What's your experience with offering VOIP to business customers in a Bring Your Own Bandwidth/Network environment? It's one thing to run VOIP over a qos-enabled network with a known bandwidth and gear that you control, and quite another to run VOIP over whatever network the customer wants to buy and whatever random gear was on sale at OfficeMax. Have you run VOIP over both types of networks? Thanks, David _______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops
On 10/30/09 8:59 AM, David Hiers wrote:
Hi, What's your experience with offering VOIP to business customers in a Bring Your Own Bandwidth/Network environment?
We do that for the smallest customers, and also allow it for larger customers if the carrier has QoS and tells us specifically they will support QoS for our needs. In any BYOB situation, we warn the customer of the potential problems very clearly. If their carrier promises QoS, we copy the customer and carrier with this information and our expectations. If the customer just wants to use something cheap (DSL) and they are small, we again explain the possible issues and let them decide. Information and agreement is the key here. The great thing is that cellular has lowered the bar for acceptable call quality. If a small customer is saving money, getting new features, and has the occasional cell-quality call, they accept that. IF they were warned in advance.
Do you require anything in writing legal or otherwise? -----Original Message----- From: voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org [mailto:voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org] On Behalf Of Carlos Alvarez Sent: Friday, October 30, 2009 9:24 AM Cc: VoiceOps at voiceops.org Subject: Re: [VoiceOps] Bring Your Own Bandwidth/Network On 10/30/09 8:59 AM, David Hiers wrote:
Hi, What's your experience with offering VOIP to business customers in a Bring Your Own Bandwidth/Network environment?
We do that for the smallest customers, and also allow it for larger customers if the carrier has QoS and tells us specifically they will support QoS for our needs. In any BYOB situation, we warn the customer of the potential problems very clearly. If their carrier promises QoS, we copy the customer and carrier with this information and our expectations. If the customer just wants to use something cheap (DSL) and they are small, we again explain the possible issues and let them decide. Information and agreement is the key here. The great thing is that cellular has lowered the bar for acceptable call quality. If a small customer is saving money, getting new features, and has the occasional cell-quality call, they accept that. IF they were warned in advance. _______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops This message and any attachments are intended only for the use of the addressee and may contain information that is privileged and confidential. If the reader of the message is not the intended recipient or an authorized representative of the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by e-mail and delete the message and any attachments from your system.
On 10/30/09 10:10 AM, Sorensen, Marty wrote:
Do you require anything in writing legal or otherwise?
We're pretty casual about this, because really the worst case for us is the customer cancels service. And regardless of contracts, we'll let a customer leave if they are unhappy. So far only one has had bad enough quality on BYOB that they wanted to cancel. Oh, we did have another that canceled because their carrier had total outages at least weekly. I do make sure that the warning is documented at least through e-mail, and the e-mail is part of the customer record in CRM. Our general service agreement already has protection against general liability and specifically excludes liability for BYOB.
We do exclusively BYOB and have had great success with it, but you do need to have a game plan in case of an ISP that doesn't play nice (one particularly large cable provider comes to mind....). We have found that often times it takes some extra time and leg work on the part of your support staff either conferenced in with the customer and ISP or arming a tech savvy customer with enough information to get problems fixed. Additionally your customers need to be aware that your service will only be as successful as their ISP. Generally for residential customers since cost is such an issue we leave it up to the Router/ATA but for business customers we make pretty extensive use of Edgemarcs since it gives us some assurance that the LAN is at least handling the traffic properly as well as providing MOS scoring and a place to run captures from the far end for diagnosing issues. IMO if you are limiting your voice network to only your controlled network segments, you might as well just be a regular LEC. On Fri, 2009-10-30 at 08:59 -0700, David Hiers wrote:
Hi, What's your experience with offering VOIP to business customers in a Bring Your Own Bandwidth/Network environment?
It's one thing to run VOIP over a qos-enabled network with a known bandwidth and gear that you control, and quite another to run VOIP over whatever network the customer wants to buy and whatever random gear was on sale at OfficeMax.
Have you run VOIP over both types of networks?
Thanks,
David _______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops
participants (5)
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anorexicpoodle＠gmail.com -
BrandonB＠netins.com -
carlos＠televolve.com -
hiersd＠gmail.com -
Marty_Sorensen＠adp.com