On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 11:22 AM, Alex Balashov <[email protected]> wrote: > The original niche of these providers was to simply provide VoIP in the > first place; established carriers were used to dealing with TDM (hard, > synchronous circuits using ISDN or SS7) and had a lot invested in > equipment and plant to do traditional telco stuff. So, someone had to > be doing the TDM<->VoIP conversion work by buying the equipment and <snip> When you think about the learning curve of the average asterisk beginner, the picture painted for them is "Become your own telco!" and we all know that's not exactly accurate. For the small asterisk install it's much more accurate to say "Get an enterprise-class pbx free (if you don't mind months of studying)."
The biggest challenge for anyone who will NOT be dealing with the carriers or large wholesalers is the inherent instability of the market for affordable ITSP. Over the past few years, many of these have fallen by the wayside or gotten so bad users began to jump ship on their own. Expect one or more announcements VERY SOON from names you've heard about. My best experience is from our DSL and ITSP. I can be talking to a human being immediately and a service tech who knows what VoIP is within a minute. They're fantastic, but I see they are about to go public and be on the NASDAQ. I hope that doesn't compromise their great service. > This will only get more true as carriers develop business processes and > technology platforms that make it more economical for them to > accommodate a wider range of customer size directly. It's sort of the > same thing that happened to independent ISPs providing dialup Internet > access when the telcos themselves got into that game. You think someday AT&T will have a web site where you can sign up for termination/origination? I guess the airlines are able to sell flights that way. Customer service would be a nightmare though. Welcome to "Your call is important to us" land. /r _______________________________________________ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
