VoIP Freedom for $37 per port

What do you do when an important customer has a booming global VoIP network, but no price effective way to extend the multi-lateral VoIP peering of its wholesale network to the vast market of enterprise customers?  This issue is exactly the challenge TransNexus faced when one of our carrier customers asked us to identify a cost effective solution for providing enterprise VoIP customers with secure access to the carrier’s managed wholesale VoIP network.

The Challenge

Our customer’s global wholesale VoIP network is growing rapidly and they are eager to add high margin VoIP traffic from enterprise customers directly to their wholesale network.  The problem,  identify a VoIP platform for small business customers which meets the following requirements.

·         Can be a VoIP gateway for customers who already have a traditional PBX.

·         Can be an IP PBX.

·         Scales from four analog lines to four E1/T1 connections.

·       Supports the OSP peering protocol for secure access control and call detail record collection with the carrier’s global wholesale network.

·         Offers total cost of ownership that is affordable for a small enterprise.

Finding a VoIP platform which satisfied all requirements was a challenge.  There are VoIP platforms which satisfy the technical requirements, but they cost $200 or more per voice channel. 

The Solution

The search for a VoIP platform which makes economic sense for small enterprise customers led to the growing field of open source VoIP solutions.  After several months of research and testing we identified the Asterisk^TM Open Source PBX (www.asterisk.org) as an excellent solution for our customer.  We selected Asterisk for the following reasons:

1. Freedom.  Our customer had the specific requirement that the enterprise VoIP platforms support the Open Settlement Protocol (OSP) for secure multi-lateral peering.  Unlike, other VoIP platforms, adding OSP support to Asterisk was quick and easy.  Working with Mark Spencer, the founder of Asterisk, support for OSP was added to Asterisk in one day – a big savings in time and effort compared to alternative solutions.  The freedom to make changes is a major benefit of Asterisk.
2. Flexibility.  Asterisk is very flexible.  Asterisk can be configured as a feature rich PBX, SIP gateway, H.323 gateway or SIP-H.323 protocol converter.
3. Maturity.  Asterisk has a large and well established base of users worldwide.  The stability and clear organization of the source code gave us confidence the final solution would be reliable.
4. Cost.  The Asterisk solution offers total cost of ownership that is affordable for small enterprise customers.  An Asterisk based VoIP gateway with a T1 interface costs only $37 per voice port.  This cost point is based on the list price of a Dell^TM PowerEdge 400SC server (2.4 GHz CPU, 512 MB RAM) and a Digium^TM T100P interface card.

How Multi-lateral VoIP Peering Works

Multi-lateral VoIP peering is managed by a trusted third party, or carrier, who is the central routing and access control authority for a large number of anonymous peer VoIP networks.  Each VoIP network has a bilateral interconnect agreement with the central trusted third party, or carrier.  As the central certificate authority, the carrier is able to provide route discovery and secure inter-domain access control services for the anonymous peer networks that do not have interconnect agreements.

Setup. Participation in a multi-lateral peering network requires that each Asterisk platform exchange public keys with the certificate authority (CA) or OSP server.  In addition, each Asterisk device must generate its own certificate and have it signed by the CA or OSP server.  The OSP client support in Asterisk provides these features.