Ask HN: VoIP anyone?
<tl;dr> You are operating multi-national and you are using a VoIP Provider? Which one? Are you happy with it? What could be better? </tl;dr>
Lets assume a startup/company slowly grows up and goes multinational. Assume further the main office is in the US, you are targeting new Customers in Europe and Australia and to overcome timezone problems you have a support team in the US, Europe and Australia.
I guess it would come down to some Providers like Vocalocity (Vonage) [1], RingCentral [2] and the more or less DIY Providers CallWithUs [3]/Voip.ms [4]?
Now, I saw providers like to high-price their services and features (ring-calls, call forwarding, ...), although it is basically all supported by SIP anyway. Is that correct?
...and here ends my knowledge totally: The way the packet travels is always source-server-destination only if the server is acting as a proxy? Meaning if someone calls from Australia to Australia, but the SIP Server is in Canada and acts also as a proxy, then there will be probably a round trip of 500ms? Or is this always the case? I was reading quite a while that voip.ms is having therefore a couple of servers [5]. I have played a little bit around with CallWithUs and get around 130ms delay to their echo-service and about 150ms delay to HongKong (I'm in Europe). Then I left a Skype conversation running to the US and someone called my DID number with his phone and, although I have no exact numbers, the latency was terrible compared to the running Skype conversation.
I am pretty stuck. Any help, advise, or any pointing in the right direction is highly appreciated! I can't be alone with that :)
Thanks
[1] http://www.vocalocity.com/ [2] http://www.ringcentral.com/ [3] https://www.callwithus.com/ [4] http://voip.ms/ [5] http://wiki.voip.ms/article/Choosing_Server