Now that we have established ourselves as an ISP for Business and have lots and lots of happy customers, it’s time to capitalize on that.
I am looking to add:
- VoIP
- Hosted PBX
- Remote Backup
- Security
What are you doing? what works? what doesn’t?
Jerry,
We are having good success with VoIP. We just installed a carrier grade Nortel switch and it has a ton of features such as Video Conferencing, whiteboards, chat etc. You can pick and choose what a customer gets and put them into packages.
We are also having a great success selling back up circuits to the SMB market. if you cant hook them on a primary connection, go after them with a back up solution in mind.
We also are having some success doing PT to PT connections in between customer prems. connecting LANS to different office buildings can be a great sell.
just a few things we dabble in.
What did the switch cost, how many voip customers do you have and what do you charge?
Try a lower cost VoIP solution, but very stable and lots of options, Asterisk server. It rocks.
It gives you voice mail, transfer, call recording, IVR, Speach Recognition, Billing, etc.
we use switchvox as VOIP PBX it is based on Asterix, but with a web front end so makes it easy to manage…
We also have native Asterix running, excellent product but requires linux knowledge…
Interesting…
How many customers do you have running through your switchvox?
not many… we are not really marketing it… we have about 80 extensions…
The problem with the SwitchVox is that it can’t act like a virtual PBX, so effectively everyone sits on one PBX, It is possible to configure Asterix to act as a virtual PBX but I have not yet devoted enough time to sorting it out…
At this stage our strategy is to bring on the customers and do the value adds later.
vj has a lot of user.
I only have 28 extensions, and an average of 424 minutes per day and 186 calls per day.
I’m also new to the software, only 9 month. I think I also need to work more on it. Got it working 100% with my Cisco boxes. Changed all the extension on my company ( 4 on total ) plus one at each mountain top.
I’m not selling the service, but giving it away to my best clients.
I find it tooooooo cheap, you can get a DID for 3.50 per month.
i’ve thought about selling filtered internet through a sonicwall. you wouldn’t be able to give a static ip to everyone obviously (we don’t do that anyway) but you’d be able to sell the same service schools and all have and i think all you’d have to do is have it on a different subnet/gateway on your sane network.
am i nuts?
we are looking into the same thing, we are planning to attack the dial up base, who don’t want to pay higher pricies, because they only use it for email so the say ?
We are looking into giving them http and mail and blocking everythign else.
I will probably use a PIX or MikroTik to do L7 inspection for me.
I think it is good idea, you should get spectacular contention ratios on it.
I’m interested in more info on the VoIP stuff being used. Buck, which Nortel switch are you using? What is your interface to the local telco? POTS, T1, ISDN? Also, I tried Asterisk a while back, but I could not get fax to work across it - it would work about 20% of the time, even with 9600 baud.
For my VoIP, currently we get the customer (all commercial so far, poor cell coverage here) to have the local telco demarc lines (POTS, FXO) at our facility in town. From here we bring them into low density h323 gateways and transport them across our network to the remote facilities. This way we only charge a monthly transport fee and don’t have to worry about long distance charge calculations and such - the telco deals with that. How is everyone else doing it?
Also, for traffic shaping we use a NetEnforcer by Allot - expensive but very versatile and the detail it provides on the trffic passing through your gateway is great.
Aaron
we had a long conference with packetlogic… it looks very good…
Jerry, I forgot to tell you we use RBackup 2006 (remote-backup.com) to sell as an extra service for our business and residential customers.
I have the demo CD. How do you like it?
i looked at rbs (remote backup) a year ago, but when I did the maths I found that it would put too much load on my network…
If you want something ridiculous easy / cheap to use LogMeIn has a backup program that you install the server client on your storage server(s) and then the actual backup client on the host PC and it backs up the files based on intervals or however you want. I really haven’t played with it that much but it’s completely java based and totally hassle-free for you. The customer pretty much does everything (which isn’t always a good thing)
Anyone interested in Co-oping a VoIP solution? I think it would be relatively easy to do… I already have Cisco Call Managers for in house use… I could easily build a partition for trial use and deploy residential… Just wonder how it would scale…
Where is that pencil and sharpener…???
By the way, I only pay $200 / month for 2000 DID’s… $3.50 each seems a bit stiff…
Anyway - I could set a soft switch at Colo4Dallas and start selling DID’s. I would just need a MAC, and … well - could we make a profit doing this???
Thoughts???
I too have been researching ways to make additional revenue through adding VoIP services. BUCK, I would be interested to hear more about that Nortel switch. Most of the research I have done is pointing twards asterisk. However we lack some funds currently to put a lot into whatever we end up doing.
I have also been looking at reselling for an established VoIP provider. So if anyone knows of GOOD providers with good reseller programs, I would be interested as well.
dptexas, what is your setup, and what are you looking to do with it?
Jerry Richardson wrote: I have the demo CD. How do you like it?
Remote backup is a good product and includes open file support now and differentials/incremental backups.
So overall it's effecient now where before it wasn't. I think this is about as good as it gets for a file based backup.
Next step for us is block based backup on a volume and shooting that over fiber to a data store.
For VoIP we use CommPartners nationwide network.
They have CLEC presence in almost all of the states.
We don’t generally use it for residential VoIP, but more for enterprise PBX replacement and call centers which is outside the general scope of Canopy Wireless.