As Mr. Hakimi Stated above, VOIP is great when you use good equipment, and back it up with good
bandwidth, like using fiber links. though some equipments like CPM well cut the latency (delay) and give real
time voice quality for parties using CPM.
Each voice provider has his own bad and goods, though we need to know the main essentials to provide such
a service to end users and corporates. VOIP needs the following:
FXO or FXS interfaces in Analog cases, such as NM-2V modules from Cisco that could be used on 26xx or
36xx series in analog, or CPM analog cards. in digital case, you well need E1 or T1 interfaces, CPM has its
cards in PCI and ISA (ISA is no longer supported though), and each card has two analog ports, you may
mount upto 10 cards in a PC running windows, on an industrial PC. the good about CPM is that we use
servers on the net for over 7 years and they were never hacked! SQL with real IPs on the net. it is so
secure and so easy to use with High quality. Digital also comes in full lenth PCI card (NMS) and comes in
single and dual E1/T1 platform, incase you have analog lines and you need digital platform you well need
a channel bank as koorosh mentioned.
A channel bank well convert digital signalling to analog, but because digital boards/cisco gateways doesn't
provide call answer supervision (tone detection and progressing such as free tone, busy line, hungup
tones) then you need a channel bank that does the answer supervision for you.
when we build a VOIP service provider, we need a carrier at the other end either to send us calls/traffic
incase we are doing incoming calls, the other carrier well be called originator and he well be doing
origination, we well be terminating there calls and we well be doing termination. and vise versa for us
doing origination. this case requires AAA, or billing, so we know how much we are spending and how
much we are profiting. CPM is a turn key solution and it is less expensive that Cisco, since Cisco requires
third party to do the billing for you, CPM also offers web access for billing ,and also for making calls from
H323 soft clients such as netmeeting. this well add a pc2phone feature such as net2phone.
CPM aslo offers a software switch that allows it's user to do call routing and switching, this well make you
a carrier, say you don't have phone lines, but you know people that has lines and providing some service
in USA, Europe or any other countries, so you can buy from those poeple and sell to others that needs
those destinations. this well make you a VOIP Carrier, you can interconnect parties that uses many
platform, such as clarent, Cisco, Vocaltec, Tenor and others, even web clients or people with softphones.
also say you have Cisco or tenor, then you can add the radius billing server feature to your CPM
softswitch and do billing for poeple that has voip hardware and charge them for the service.
I hope this information clears things for you, though i am most glad to answer any further questions.