Would anyone in the list be able to recommend a SIP trunk provider in the
Chicago area? Not a VoIP expert, so just looking for someone with previous
experience.
Thanks,
Rafael
We have facilities in Chicago and LAX based on Broadsoft technology that I think is pretty awesome. Would welcome answering any questions for you....
Regards,
James Laszko
Mythos Technology Inc
jamesl@mythostech.com
951-813-2674 direct
Sorry, intended for off-list reply. Sorry for noise.
James
Thanks everyone for your responses.
I too am looking for the Chicago area. Low volume. I'm looking for people whose SIP and RTP hit the end of the road in Chicago. Not interested in someone whose SIP servers are in LA , but will redirect me to the nearest gateway... without telling me where said gateway is.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but what does it matter if the RTP from your perspective ends in Chicago or not? If it does end in Chicago, that only means they are proxying the audio before sending it on to the actual media gateway for that call where it finally drops onto the PSTN. So all that happens is that the audio latency remains the same (or worse, because of the additional, unnecessary proxy) AND that the actual media gateway remains hidden from you. You won't be able to actually test and see the latency to the MG, and you will be under the (false) impression that latency across all calls is equally "good" because you are only measuring RTT to a specific and common media proxy. By sending the audio directly to an MG closer to the point of exit from IP-land, it is taking a more direct route to the callee than you are seemingly asking for.
If you're not talking about adding a proxy to the equation, are you expecting to find a provider in Chicago that immediately goes from IP to PSTN within Chicago, regardless of the actual destination of the call? Circuit-switched TDM is not a no-latency connection. Physics is involved here. The farther apart the caller is from the callee, the more latency there will be, regardless of the medium. All other things being equal (similar network path, etc.), I doubt IP packet switching significantly increases the latency over and above TDM call trunking. But I'm not an expert, and again, if I'm missing something here, I would love to be proven wrong.
I want the gateway in Chicago as well.
I am Chicago based. The end users are Chicago based. Therefore the origination would be coming from a Chicago area gateway. Half of the calls (inbound would be guaranteed to be local as they'd be coming in through a local tandem anyway. Most of the termination traffic would again be to local numbers, therefore would again have to be through local tandems.
Why not set up a small Asterisk box in a local datacenter and only trunk out the non-local calls?
Owen
Why not set up a small Asterisk box in a local datacenter and only trunk =
out the non-local calls?
And do what with the local calls, then? You're still left with the
problem of getting calls to and from the PSTN.
Not everyone wants to deal with the hassle of dealing with POTS or T1
gatewaying. In general, it isn't practical to do on a small scale any
more, especially as one looks forward a few years to the inevitable
dismantling of the legacy POTS network.
... JG
If you’re going to the PSTN, who gives a shit where you do the interconnect as
long as its within 100ms.
If most of your calls are VOIP<->VOIP within Chicago, then it makes some sense
to set up a box and just send the external calls out to the trunking provider where
you no longer really care where they are.
Absent significant network suckage, there’s no place in the contiguous US that
isn’t within 100 ms of any other place in the contiguous US these days.
Owen
End to end delay is not the most limiting factor. Jitter is the issue and packet drops are the other issue that matters (more importantly the distribution of drops). I think the best reason to select the local provider over the distant one is that the sooner he gets off the IP network the less impairments he will run into. The TDM network as antiquated as it is, is less susceptible to congestion and call impairments than an IP backbone network is. I can tell you from running a bunch of International VOIP networks that they are just not as reliable as TDM. The average internet connection just does not meet the reliability standards that the TDM voice network has achieved. IP networks are affected by congestion and routing issues whereas the TDM network seldom has these type of problems. An outage on a TDM circuit rarely affects other TDM circuits so they see a lot less higher level outages. I can understand why he does not want to haul his voice cross country over IP when he is exiting locally most of the time.
Yes, I understand that the carrier might very well be hauling that traffic via IP even after he gets to his gateway point but at that point it becomes their problem to deal with.
Steven Naslund
Chicago IL
When I originally posted the thread, I had asked Chicago due to physical
proximity, and my assumption being the lesser the number of hops, the lower
the probability of running into issues (latency, jitter and congestion). On
the other hand, one of my sandboxes are out of Las Vegas and I haven't had
any issues yet, but the number of test calls I've ran aren't enough to say
with confidence that distance and hops don't matter (indirect ways of
measuring latency, etc).
Another thing is, having your packets stay in Chicago and in Chicago only
is a nice thing, the efficiency of your overall system would be higher for
what it's worth, but as an example, the 2nd hop this e-mail is taking to
get delivered to Nanog is about 100 miles, who knows about the other ones.
Might try OneSourceNetworks.
They have a primary hub out of Chicago and do SIP very well.
http://www.onesourcenetworks.com/
Been a while since I have had any dealings with them, but good folk all the way around.
FWIW, I don’t know where their root nodes are or where their proxies are
located, but I’ve had excellent service from CallCentric for several years.
They’ve just plain worked everywhere I’ve tried in first-world countries and
generally fairly well even in places that were network challenged like Rwanda
~5 years ago, Haiti ~3 years ago, Suriname, Morocco ~6 years ago, etc.
They’ve even worked pretty well from most of the hotel WiFi networks where
I have attempted to use them.
I given them $1.95 per month and something around a penny per minute
on the rare occasion when I use the service. This gets me a DID number,
as well as outgoing service with customized caller-ID mapping. Admittedly
this is for a single-line rather than SIP trunking, but I believe they also offer
trunking services.
Owen
The TDM network is rapidly being eliminated. The major telcos have been moving their backbones to VOIP and higher levels of oversubscription as a result for years now because of the very large cost savings that can be achieved.
International TDM may still be pretty common, but domestic TDM is rapidly becoming as popular as a Strowger.
Owen
I too am looking for the Chicago area. Low volume. I'm looking for
people whose SIP and RTP hit the end of the road in Chicago. Not
interested in someone whose SIP servers are in LA , but will redirect
me to the nearest gateway... without telling me where said gateway is.
I know that voip.ms has sip/rtp nodes in Chicago.
I don't know what the next hop is (whether is is tdm or something like
sip/rtp orver a dedicated ethernet to a clec or an ixc or what), but I
find the latency minimal.
-JimC
Okay, sure. But I think we might be talking past each other here. My whole response was predicated on the assumption that the media gateway that a given term call is sent to is picked based on its geographic proximity to either the ratecenter/CO or tandem of the callee. It doesn't really make sense for a provider to do anything otherwise, AFAICT, so I doubt that they would. If my assumption is correct, you gain no advantage by having your long-distance term calls go through a Chicago MG (which was my original argument to begin with), and any local Chicago calls would be sent to a local Chicago MG anyway, so you're sweating bullets over nothing. And, like you said, origination for your end users would be hitting a Chicago MG already.
Soo...problem solved?
Okay, fair enough. I guess I made the assumption somehow that Mike was concerned solely about latency, which if that's all he is concerned about, then the points you bring up would largely be strawmen. But I just re-read Mike's post, and he doesn't state his reasons for wanting the local gateway. It must have been Dovid's reply that planted the seed of the idea in my mind that Mike was primarily concerned about latency.
-- Nathan
That may be true of metro areas, but in rural USA there's plenty of TDM to go around. Telco's are still delivering broadband on ADSL and phone on TDM. Worse those trunked circuits are TDM over HDSL. In many rural areas, there's not even ADSL or cable and that's within 40 miles of a small city.
--Curtis