Suitability of Leap for VOIP

cousin_borat

Hi all,

this is following from a query in the Broadband forum about asymetric providers of broadband since we are implementing a VOIP telephone system in the office.

The choice is down to Irish Broadband or Leap. Leap claim that their TDM protocol (Time divisional Multiplexing) is more suited to VOIP since it can deliver the packets in order and is better than SHSS encoding used by IBB.

My question is, has anybody used or heard feedback from others on using Leap with VOIP or has heard from others on Leaps support and service?

The two options are 1Mb Symetric, 4:1 contention (Eur199/mon) or 2Mb with 8:1 (Eur299/mon). Im going towards 2Mb just to be on the safe side.

Thanks

causal

First off I have no experience with Leap or IBB so I can't help you there.

If this is for your office then I'd be looking for a trial.
Which Leap service are you thinking of using - wireless, sdsl, (presumably not adsl with a crappy 256kbps upload)

Do you know what your peak bandwidth requirements are for VoIP (in addition to your normal internet usage) - how many users - how many calls etc.?
1Mb is a decent amount of VoIP traffic - I've found that one voice call typically uses less than 50kbps in both directions (X-Lite, DUMeter) - that equates to around 20 calls per 1Mbps.
But 1Mb is nothing if it's also being used for web surfing + emailing etc.

2Mb @ 8:1 contention
1Mb @ 4:1 contention
- these are equivalent IF the line is fully contented.

In any event, you'll want to guarantee QoS for your VoIP packets. The last thing you want in business is customers irritated because they can't have a decent phone conversation with you.
"I ord---d th--e --ods f--- we-ks -go"
Eh, sorry, can you call me back on the mobile

I'm not trying to scare-monger or put you off, I'm an advocate of VoIP, but be certain you get what you need, and you'll be laughing all the way to the bank

hth,
causal

Blaster99

You will need to shape the traffic on that line if you want to use VoIP for anything other than a toy, to make sure VoIP gets priority. I'd say you'll be fine with Leap but you need to keep in mind that telco telephone services operate with significantly higher uptime than ISP's do so you would take some risk running a mission critical phone service over VoIP.

There's a VoIP company in Ireland that targets corporates and I suspect they deal with some of these issues. Can't be bothered googling now, but it's something like voipirl.com.

The Brigadier

I used Leap for over a year before I moved back to the UK. I found the QOS to be fantastic - well ahead of any DSL suppliers I had used.

Leap is a business grade product and really is worthwhile. I compared it with IBB myself and from talking to several users afterwards was sure I had made the right move. I have heard too many issues regarding signal with IBB.

As regards uptime...in 1 year my downtime totaled about 30 mins in one outage.

WillieFlynn

It may be worth keeping at least one normal phone line as a failover.

Also consider putting your VOIP network equipment on a UPS so that they will not be effected by power cuts / glitches.

Willie

cousin_borat

Thanks all for the feedback. Yep it's the Wireless solution we'd be looking at going for.

One of the main attractions of VOIP for us apart from cost savings is the ability to have remote workers as part of the office telephone network, ie they can be reached on their extension etc when they're at home. There are a number of helplines that customers call in on and we have up to 5/6 persons working at various locations throughout the country at any one time as well as the persons within the office itself. Because these persons will be using VPN simaltaneously to having their VOIP service we need at least 1Mb bandwidth with low contention.

As far as UPS goes we have two UPS systems one for the Servers and another for the VOIP gateway. Were usiing a Panasonic VOIP Gateway that integrates into the existing LAN Network. It's reasonably easy to set up, on the LAN router set up port forwarding for the VOIP packets to send to the Gateway.

cousin_borat

Leap are coming to do a LOS test. All going well I'll update the post in the future with the results and the exact setup we have