I am in the process of attempting to get my company to switch internet and voice providers and get away from the T1 lines we are currently using. While I am not permitted to name the company in this form nor enable to act on its behalf I will say it is a national company with multiple locations in nearly every state.
Recently I recieved an email defending the decision to use T1's over any other service available and would welcome any help I could get to refute it. Here is what I recieved:
"There are a several other aspects that go into a design decision like this. The first aspect is the quality of service component in the cloud (Comcast and Internet). Comcast provides traffic prioritization for Comcast voice only. When using Comcast with a VPN solution voice quality is unstable, unreliable, and averages worse than a cell phone call. It works fine for a Vonage but when you add several calls at once the degradation of services increase to a noticeable level (MOS scores). A T1 circuit @ 1.536 has tight QoS SLA's with voice guarantees, as well as reduced latency which will prevent calls from working beyond 250ms round-trip delay. Traditionally when sending traffic through the Internet, voice is acceptable for home use but not for business quality services. This is because it is not a guaranteed service and can drop at any time. Jitter is also common on these types of services. When considering the cost of losing a call or a series of calls, this becomes a factor. Add to this are the SLA's from Comcast to a carrier like AT&T and there are large differences. For AT&T, they restore services quickly. At Comcast, it is not a considered high priority outage unless 20,000+ clients are down from one incident, which means that it can take a few weeks to restore services for a connectivity issue. If less than 20,000 users are affected, it is not even reported until the next day.
There are a lot of other factors that also go into the decision criteria, but we regularly re-evaluate all solutions in order to find the best business solution for AmeriGas. At some point in time the Internet will be good alternative which will drastically reduce our cost footprint, but until all of the factors ensure it is reliable for business use, we will have to continue using alternate solutions.
[NAME REMOVED]
Sr. IT Architect
Engineering Manager"
Currently in the process of installing cisco 7942G VOIP phones at all office locations, and our computers systems are using virtual desktops running from centeral servers located on the east coast through Wyse thin clients utilizing Citrix. Also use sharepoint (badly).
Thanks in advance.
Recently I recieved an email defending the decision to use T1's over any other service available and would welcome any help I could get to refute it. Here is what I recieved:
"There are a several other aspects that go into a design decision like this. The first aspect is the quality of service component in the cloud (Comcast and Internet). Comcast provides traffic prioritization for Comcast voice only. When using Comcast with a VPN solution voice quality is unstable, unreliable, and averages worse than a cell phone call. It works fine for a Vonage but when you add several calls at once the degradation of services increase to a noticeable level (MOS scores). A T1 circuit @ 1.536 has tight QoS SLA's with voice guarantees, as well as reduced latency which will prevent calls from working beyond 250ms round-trip delay. Traditionally when sending traffic through the Internet, voice is acceptable for home use but not for business quality services. This is because it is not a guaranteed service and can drop at any time. Jitter is also common on these types of services. When considering the cost of losing a call or a series of calls, this becomes a factor. Add to this are the SLA's from Comcast to a carrier like AT&T and there are large differences. For AT&T, they restore services quickly. At Comcast, it is not a considered high priority outage unless 20,000+ clients are down from one incident, which means that it can take a few weeks to restore services for a connectivity issue. If less than 20,000 users are affected, it is not even reported until the next day.
There are a lot of other factors that also go into the decision criteria, but we regularly re-evaluate all solutions in order to find the best business solution for AmeriGas. At some point in time the Internet will be good alternative which will drastically reduce our cost footprint, but until all of the factors ensure it is reliable for business use, we will have to continue using alternate solutions.
[NAME REMOVED]
Sr. IT Architect
Engineering Manager"
Currently in the process of installing cisco 7942G VOIP phones at all office locations, and our computers systems are using virtual desktops running from centeral servers located on the east coast through Wyse thin clients utilizing Citrix. Also use sharepoint (badly).
Thanks in advance.
