Question : VOIP System Setup

Hi All,

We need to setup VOIP system in place for our US based business. The scope of the system has to be the same as other VOIP providers as Vongae, Packet8 etc but it's just for incoming calls.

We are looking for an outsourced help, which can help us implement this. It will be great if we can also get some kind of information as to what hardware/software we should be looking at. Again, this is going to be a brand new system in place starting from the scratch.

Any help will be much appreciated.

Thanks

Answer : VOIP System Setup

The Gridborg pricing relates to the number of simultaneous calls. Your calls are going to be very short so you should only require a few (maybe even just one or two).

There has to a be a PSTN gateway somewhere in this solution. It could be operated by a VoIP service provider like Vonage - there are plenty of providers to chose from:
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/VOIP+Service+Providers+Business+North+America

They would allocate you a number - or numbers - and you require them to deliver the calls to your VoIP server using SIP. If you want to keep your existing numbers then you might have to get your existing provider to re-direct calls to the Vonage (or whoever) number. If you are lucky, you might be able to get your numbers transferred to your Vonage service, but I don't know what number portability is like in the USA.

The option to put an adaptor in your own premises (grblades option 2) very much depends on whether the existing service is being delivered down your company's telephone lines. You mentioned earlier that your "in place system is a non-VOIP call center system". Is it located in your premises or is it externally hosted?

By the way, I am not so sure now that SER would be the right solution. I have been looking for a way to make SER update a database table and I am struggling to find a documented procedure that does it from the core script. If the only option is to write your own module in C, then that is hardly an easy solution. It may just be that the documentation is weak (or my ability to search!). Another drawback of SER is that it is designed to act a proxy server, not as a so-called User Agent. This means it cannot register itself with a third party SIP provider such as Vonage. It can accept registrations from other UA's but it cannot act as a UA itself. Asterisk and Gridborg both have the option to register with a third party provider.