VoIP questions

[Floppyman]

Hi all,

I'm planning on sharing a broadband internet connection between 2 buildings using wireless (the buildings are in sight of each other)and a router on one end (to be able to share the connection). Here comes the tough part: I would also like to be able to use the telephone over this connection between the two buildings, I guess you could say VoIP. Is this possible to do within a reasonable price range (seems like most VoIP gear is made for companies, not indivual consumers). If it doesn't work is it possible to hook up separate phones (one in each building, separate phone lines) and have them intercom to each other? Would this work? It would be best if there was way to use some sort of voice communication over the wireless network (aka broadband connection) through phones without having to use phone lines. It would be perfect if this could be done with analog phones, if not is there a phone that can be assigned an IP address (but still has a jack for regular telephone) and it would be an IP to IP call? The best way would be to be able hook up to plain analog phones into this network and use them over this network to call each other. Thanks in Advance.

 

[ScottMac]

VoIP, as it exists today, would almost certainly not work. The latency, bandwidth, and expense would probably be intolerable.

You may be able to get by with a good wireless telephone.

VoIP telephones do not use anything resembling standard telephone signalling (IP is IP, phone is phone).

Maybe you can add a forwarding feature to your wired phone, and forward incomming calls to a cellular? Or just do a cellular?

Your local telco might be able to give you an "alarm circuit" ... basically a pair of copper between the buildings, but it's not likely that you could drive a regular phone line that far (like having an extension) ... and it sounds like the distance would be too far to drive an Ethernet / network connection.

Not much good news here, I'm afraid. I don't think it's gonna happen for ya.

Good Luck

Scott

 

[mobly99]

You could look into getting a couple of the Cisco ATA186's - They are less than $200 a piece and let you connect 2 analog phones to them and then connect to an ethernet network - from there you could connect to your wireless network.

This would let you make calls between the two locations, but you can't connect to the PSTN with this solution without additional hardware that is much more expensive.

Keep in mind that if you have no way of doing QoS over your wireless connection, you have no way of ensuring voice quality. Do some testing with Netmeeting accross your wireless link and initiate some large file transfers and see what will happen to your voice quality.

-Dave

 

[Floppyman]

Thanks for the replies and great info, guys.

 

[Soybomb]

I agree it would be too expensive since I don't know of any consumer level products to do this. Are you saying though that if you had a halfway decent voip system you couldn't run a couple phones off a wireless link? I've never done it but I know my voip calls to our noc and other places have more latency and less bandwidth available than with a wireless link to the building across the street... Actually many in the wisp business have found this voip service to work reasonably well.

Originally posted by: ScottMac
VoIP, as it exists today, would almost certainly not work. The latency, bandwidth, and expense would probably be intolerable.

You may be able to get by with a good wireless telephone.

VoIP telephones do not use anything resembling standard telephone signalling (IP is IP, phone is phone).

Maybe you can add a forwarding feature to your wired phone, and forward incomming calls to a cellular? Or just do a cellular?

Your local telco might be able to give you an "alarm circuit" ... basically a pair of copper between the buildings, but it's not likely that you could drive a regular phone line that far (like having an extension) ... and it sounds like the distance would be too far to drive an Ethernet / network connection.

Not much good news here, I'm afraid. I don't think it's gonna happen for ya.

Good Luck

Scott

 

[ScottMac]

Keeping in mind that the description of his whole setup is kinda vague....

A wireless ISP is not the same as buying a couple wireless APs/Gateways/Routers and aiming them at each other.

Next is buying the equipment (not cheap), next is the additional latency of encoding/decoding from baseband to wireless broadband (at least at the consumer level) ... recommended is (if I recall properly) ~250ms end-to-end, worse case.

Next is bandwidth: wireless - suboptimal transmission path and equipment - consumer-grade - novice implementer - probably no QOS .... probably not a likely scenario for success. Lots of money and time invested in a crap shoot. I'm still guessing it's not likely to happen (to semi-quote the mods).

MAYBE with a g.711 CODEC-based system, maybe ... with decent latency and a good dejitter system. D'ya figure he wants to drop a couple grand (tens of thousands, actually) on a Cisco VoIP solution? Or Nortel? Or Alcatel?

If he was putting up something like a SyLink wireless T1 point-to-point (for a thousands of dollars), or some similar high-end wireless, there'd be a chance.

You could put a Cisco 2600 on each end with an FXO WIC in one and an FXS WIC in the other and use a pots phone...but there's almost certainly not enough bandwidth on the (consumer-grade) wireless. The 2600s with WICs would be ~US$4000-6000.00. Maybe 1700s could handle it, I don't know, I've never played with 'em. So, OK, maybe US$10,000.00 you could work something out. Buy all the stuff from Ebay...get the price down to US$3000-4000.00 or so. How cheap is "reasonably priced?"

I scratched my head for a while on it, and nothing came to mind that seemed to fit the situation. It doesn't mean there isn't anything, just nothing I can think of (especially that fits the "inexpensive" category).

FWIW

Scott

 

[Soybomb]

Actually a ton of wisps are using consumer level wireless equipment modified for outdoor use (a nice little panel antenna and power over ethernet usually). We don't use that ourselves since the fcc isn't usually pleased with it, but maybe do with linksys, orinoco, etc. Latency of 40ms is usually considered high even with this equipment.

Our last voip setup was a 3com nbx and I would feel pretty confident that you could have it running on say a network in the one building and then shoot it with wireless out to another building within a reasonable distance. call setup took the largest amount of bandwidth but after that the required bandwidth dropped considerably. I do agree through without a way to prioritize the traffic it would suck if you were also passing data on it.

Anyway didn't mean to start much of a debate, I've never tried, it just sounds like it would work to me. I've got the old nbx on my desk......if I get some spare time and can find some phones somewhere I might try it out!

No matter I still agree that its not practical for home use unless you have a voip phone system just kicking around. And even if it did work with some cheap wireless bridges I wouldn't want to use it for business use I don't think. I'd feel more comfortable with some wmux gear

 

[Soybomb]

A similiar topic on another board
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