Well this chain went on quite a ways and I read Scott's posts. I will agree that originally it was for larger companies.. Facebook uses SD WAN instead of MPLS. However, SD WAN is a good alternative for MPLS actually.

I agree it does make more sense with bigger companies, however this is how it works and why it is advantageous.

SD Wan like Aryaka allows you to choose the best Edge provider in your geographic regions. Then the SD Wan provider has NTN interfaces with all the carriers and with the shortest amount of hops brings the traffic back onto their backbone.

However, you could very easily build your own solution. Simply build out strategic data center locations nation wide and geographically have your end user sites VPN to the data center and connect your data center over their backbone or set up Gig Wave circuits between sites.

This is becomming the standard for multi-site scenarios. Anyone who has 4 or 5 sites and wants to use a single carrier for MPLS can attest that certain sites when they price out are more expensive because they are offnet. SD WAN is providing a realistic alternative for this while keeping latency low and being able to tag packets for priority for voice and Video.

@anonymous

Well having worked with all the major systems including free ones I would be glad to discuss this in a little more detail with you. The reality is that each have their advantages depending on what your business needs are. Is there any way we might be able to chat in more detail together about this?

Are you looking for the software to be free? Or are you just asking in general what is the best?

@scottalanmiller said:

Does Shoretel have any other SBCs that it is known to work with? What about Blox or OpenSIP?

ShoreTel strategically partnered with only InGate.. so much so that now that the whole system is completely virtualized even the InGate SIP controller is virtualized with the ShoreTel VMs.

@scottalanmiller

Well.. now you are getting beyond my expertise :). If you could do that I am sure it would work great. However, I know that many of these companies want an all in one solution that falls under a single support contract and that's what the ShoreTel Border Controller offers them. Basically they just don't want to think about it. But in the cases where they do like to think out of the box a bit I'll keep you in mind to help with that!

Hey Scott,

Sorry to follow you over here on this topic :), but I check these boards now also great community add-on... I agree with you on the Voice Pulse thing. It might work.. the problem is that it might not. SIP is SIP for the most part, but SIP is also not always the same between all carriers because there are many settings in the SIP protocol and because they are not standardized it causes problems on certain systems.

I really don't understand why on Asterisk it seems like they can accept any SIP connection. I believe it is because you have direct control over the way each protocol is accepted and you can put in all the settings from a specific provider to make it work properly. For some reason on ShoreTel and other proprietary PBX systems you do not have this kind of control or access. ShoreTel requires the use of a SIP border controller through INGate usually we will use a INGate Siperator 21 or higher product depending on the amount of voice channels. In the INGate we can change the settings to work with any carrier, however, there are predefined carriers in the INGate SIP profiles that will work "Out of the box" with ShoreTel. You could definitely get Voice Pulse to work with ShoreTel, but it may take some engineering and support time with the carrier to get it working properly.

Those are my thoughts on it. All in all it is just far easier to get it to work with the carriers that are already certified with it.

It is actually pretty difficult comparatively to other systems. I have worked with more than a few and I am not a fan of the complexity there.

Hi guys,

I am loving this new forum really cool and I am here to shamelessly self promote myself! Many of you know me on SpiceWorks as a go to for ShoreTel related questions. I am still focused heavily on ShoreTel, but I have taken a more consultant approach and also can assist with other solutions too. My company works with all kinds of services. We have over 70 agreements with major carriers in the US. Because of the volume we have started doing we are also able to create agreements with MSPs to resell services so you can earn on voice, data, cloud services. The great part is we assist and do much of the work.

Well there it is my shameless self promotion. If any of you have any questions though feel free to reach out at anytime. I am glad to gather pricing for you or your clients and those that know me I am pretty unbiased and more technical so not trying to do a sales approach. Simply arm you with the best information for whatever it is you are looking for more info on.

Thanks Matt

Thanks Reid!

Thanks!

Oh haha just a reload.

I loaded up a Gravitar on the site and used the same email address. Not showing.. eh.

Man you guys are on it! Thanks!

I go to my profile and I see a change picture option, but it just says Gravitar and I cannot seem to change it, what am I missing?