Can somebody tell me what expenses VoIP company have?

Hello,
I am wondering what expenses typical VoIP company (provider of VoIP services working with softphone or access phone number) have. Can somebody help me out here? I know that every provider have to pay PSTN fees to SIP provider, marketing, what else is left? Is there a cost associated with a bandwidth? Also, who does the routing of calls for you? Is there any hardware necessary?
Thanks a lot for your time and help!
Janny

Hi Janny

Some initial info on the posts here ...

http://www.voipuser.org/forum_topic_6217.html

Its hard to be specific as I am not sure what a 'typical voip company' is. It further depends on what level of service you want to provide, if you are doing this commercially then you need full hardware redundancy (basically two of everything).

Its a major undertaking and unless you are offering something significantly different from the others then marketing costs become a major factor too.

Starting from scratch a good ballpark startup figure is $20k, plus hosting/bandwidth costs, assuming you're doing all the SIP software development, install and config (and you proxy all media traffic so as to not require a dedicated "intelligent" SBC). If you have to outsource the development side, make it $50k. If you don't want to proxy all media traffic, make it $60k.

Hosting costs will vary depending on whether you want to provide a high quality service or go for bucket shop pricing.

Level3 facilities are not cheap for example (eg Telehouse/Redbus), but will give you one-hop fibre link to all other internet traffic exchanges.

On the other side of the coin, these days you can buy 1,000 gig of internet traffic for $60/month, but at that price point you'll find your server is buried behind a handful of routers, 4/5 hops from any major backbone. Audio doesn't like that.

Internet bandwidth can be capped through internet exchange peering arrangements (see linx.net for example - I think that's about £1,500/quarter) if you become an ISP and manage your own internet bandwidth/traffic.

Then you need to organise a billing engine (tricky if you're not proxying) and of course online credit card payments - your bank may have specific requirements in that regard.

Dean

and good luck with fraud......

tangle :

and good luck with fraud......

Do you mean CC fraud or there is another threat?

Hi

Well yes CC fraud but have a read of http://www.informationweek.com/news/sho ... aking+News
for the other type
Ian

gray :

It further depends on what level of service you want to provide, if you are doing this commercially then you need full hardware redundancy (basically two of everything).

What hardware do you need?

Quote:

What hardware do you need?

Routers for routing calls, a server(s) for doing billing, SBC's etc.

Dean

dean :

Quote: What hardware do you need? Routers for routing calls, a server(s) for doing billing, SBC's etc. Dean

Dean,
thanks a lot for your reply. I am little bit lost here, do I still need switch or softswitch if I am going to have router for routing calls? How much router like that cost? And by SBC do you mean Single Board Computer or Smart Bitrate Control ?

SBC = Session Border Controller.

Quote:

I am little bit lost here

With the questions you're asking to be honest you need help. Hire a professional to build the network for you. It's not simple - you can't learn how to do that by asking a few select questions.

You need to concentrate on marketing - that's the hard part. Money can't buy you a stroke of genius piece of technology, or financial model, and that's what you need to come up with.

If you already have that - don't waste it. Go get funding and do it properly.

Dean,
thanks a lot for your reply. I am more a business brain than a computer person, even though I am a Computer Network major graduate, so technical side is my weekness I am trying to work on.

Thank you and this forum, because the information here are very useful.
Janny