Hosted VoIP???

I would say 85%+ of businesses in America are hobby businesses by your definitions (this post and others). I'm not arguing; just stating what I have seen in 30+ years of servicing highly successful privately owned corporations. I consider "highly successful" to be 25Mil+ in annual revenue.

scottalanmiller

@JasGot said in Hosted VoIP???:

@scottalanmiller said in Hosted VoIP???:

higher than necessary cost and a CEO that clearly doesn't know what he's doing.

No cost is too high if the CEO (also owner) can justify it in his head.

If you are a hobby then that is true. If you are a business, then that's not true. All comes down to objective:

Hobby Objective: Make the owner happy.
Business Objective: Profits

scottalanmiller

@JasGot said in Hosted VoIP???:

@scottalanmiller said in Hosted VoIP???:

If the CEO is the owner, that makes this a hobby business and we don't care.

I would say 85%+ of businesses in America are hobby businesses by your definitions (this post and others). I'm not arguing; just stating what I have seen in 30+ years of servicing highly successful privately owned corporations. I consider "highly successful" to be 25Mil+ in annual revenue.

That's roughly the number that I state to people. So I definitely agree. Far and away MOST organizations classified under business law in the US serve the purpose of the owner's ego or whims and do not have the purpose of running as a business. They use the guise of business either for the tax haven that it provides or for the ego boost that it tends to give.

And to be clear, NTG is a hobby because we are not profits focused. I don't "accuse" others of something I don't accept being myself. We take business seriously, but we ourselves are a hobby because we put our employees ahead of profits and we definitely will engage in unprofitable business for fun (e.g. we might invest in a restaurant not because it's the wise business decision but because it should be a fun way to not lose too much money.)

We are legally a business, of course, and are way less of a hobby than most hobby businesses, but we are a hobby nonetheless.

scottalanmiller

@JasGot said in Hosted VoIP???:

@scottalanmiller said in Hosted VoIP???:

You are seeing longer than necessary outages,

No, not really. When a contractor cuts a fiber line with a backhoe, and the ISP is there is 20 minutes, that's a good SLA for the customer.

In our world, real world problems are not like you anticipate.

In the real world, we consistently see fiber cuts to public lines getting priority over SLA'd lines. SLA's protect the vendor from needing to prioritize those lines because they are relieved from "best effort." SLA always means "less than best effort."

I've seen SLA'd outages where they were supposed to be just a few hours extend to months because the punishment of the SLA was less than the cost of repair. But because the SLA meant that the contract was still in place the customer couldn't stop paying because the vendor was meeting their SLA obligation by paying the fee (often not as big as the fee the customer pays.). So the vendor was making more money by not meeting the SLA time frame.

To see how an SLA works you can't look at it in absolute terms but relative ones. People with SLAs talk about "they got me fixed in under the two hours we agreed to" while people without SLAs talk mostly about how they didn't have to pay anything and were fixed in minutes.

I'm talking real world, I've never, literally never, seen someone benefit from an SLA. But the CEO's whose reputations would be tarnished if they admitted to their failure, always claim that they'd rather have the company lose money than to not have someone to blame for it.

That's where an SLA comes into play. When you don't care about profits, but need someone to blame. If your company is about politics (blame game) rather than profits (bottom line) then you are 1. a hobby and 2. perfect for an SLA.

Except anyone familiar with how an SLA works would then blame whoever signed one.

Literally just got off of a phone call with a customer who got absolutely screwed by an SLA contract.

scottalanmiller

@JasGot said in Hosted VoIP???:

@scottalanmiller said in Hosted VoIP???:

A happy CEO doesn't matter at all, happy owners are

In this neck of the woods, 99% of the CEOs are THE owners.

Not uncommon and nothing wrong with that. But it's important to classify "happiness" at the topmost level of the hats that they wear.

Even as the owner, their CEO hatted self should feel shame for wasting their money and getting an emotional "fix" from having someone to blame for their own failings. As a CEO, playing politics with myself is, quite frankly, embarrassing. Imagine if you ever had to explain to someone, like at the country club, that you intentionally threw away your own money because you liked the ability to blame someone other than yourself, except you can't because it was your decision, but you got a piece of paper that said that you could, so it made you happy.

That's like... straight jacket time. But that's literally the conversation we are assuming is going on in the owner's head!

kmac76

@siringo I have worked in this space since 1998, which makes me old! Lol. The major difference isn't the SDWAN vs MPLS. It's the loss/jitter tolerance of modern voice codecs, i.e. the software that takes your voice, samples it, and encodes it into packets on a wire.

When VoIP was startign out, right around the time I joined the workforce, QoS over SLA-backed PtP cirvuits, later MPLS. were absolutely necessary, as was an solid QoS networking config/deployment.

That's when "G.711" and "G.729" were pre-eminent. G.729 was used to compress voice across WAN links, and it was not at all loss or jitter tolerant. Barely any loss/excessive jitter, and forget it.

Modern codecs- Opus especially (Opus has been added to the public domain) - are incomparably better than predecessors. Full detail here: https://opus-codec.org/. It is adaptive, meaning, it will adapt to network conditions, expanding up to wideband if the bandwidth is available, but having the ability to adapt to network conditions in ways G.729 couldn't come close to.

In there early days of improved codecs - SILK, iLBC, I was a holdout, like most early VoIP engineers who suffered through the early pain points. However, the proof is in the reality that some of the largest organizations in the world, and all major prem, and cloud IP-PBX/UCaaS providers support Opus. Think about COVID - are any of us connecting across MPLS anymore? Nope. Voice quality issues? Here and there, and just as often having to do with acoustic echo caused by poor mic/speakers as it is network packet loss, etc. Mostly, we all do just fine. This wouldn't have been posible without these codec advancements.

I spent years building Nortel, the Cisco, then Cisco/Microsoft UC practices. These days, I strongly advise you no longer think of VoIP as something you buy. Think of it as a feature of you broader commmunication collaboraation solution. Maybe that's Cisco Webex Voice/Teams. Maybe that's Microsoft Teams. Maybe that's Google Voice and Slack.

My point is - buying a dedicated Voice, or even Voice/Video, or even Voice/Video/Meetings solution is an anachronism. Personally, I view Microsoft Teams, either with Microsoft-provided PSTN access for smaller businesses, or self-provided SIP Trunking, i.e. "Direct Routing," as the best platform. Not all the corner case voice features are there yet - Cisco's platform does that better - but Microsoft's platform addresses much more critical path items that Cisco never will, whereas Microsoft will close voice gap/mostly has.

My 2 cents!

Dashrender

@kmac76 said in Hosted VoIP???:

My point is - buying a dedicated Voice, or even Voice/Video, or even Voice/Video/Meetings solution is an anachronism. Personally, I view Microsoft Teams, either with Microsoft-provided PSTN access for smaller businesses, or self-provided SIP Trunking, i.e. "Direct Routing," as the best platform. Not all the corner case voice features are there yet - Cisco's platform does that better - but Microsoft's platform addresses much more critical path items that Cisco never will, whereas Microsoft will close voice gap/mostly has.

Huh - I think your idea is sound, the problem is cost. I looked at the cost of Teams with PSTN access and it was outrageous compared to splitting the PSTN access out of Teams. Heck Teams is "free" if you have M365 already.
I looked at Teams PSTN access last year it was around $20/user/month, and there is zero extension to extension calling - i.e. you want to call the person next you, you have to dial their 10 digit number. Not to mention I didn't look into what it takes to manage physical devices (desk phones) connected to Teams.
My host PBX solution and PSTN access costs me around $12/u/m, that's a significant savings.