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jonathanserafini
Asked: 2013-03-29 11:17:21 +0800 CST

Trans-atlantic VOIP

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We're a Canadian business on the east coast and will soon be opening up a new call centre in Australia. This new call centre will be handling our graveyard shift and will be overlapping with the current call centre. As such, I'd need to be able to (SIP) forward calls from our North American Asterisk PBX to Australia.

I'm thinking this may be a problem as it'd require 2+ trans-atlantic trips and would therefore cause a pretty hefty latency on all such calls.

Does anyone have any experience with this ? Or alternative implementations to suggest ?

:: Edit :: Would having a local Australian SIP trunk to provide local numbers cause additional issues ?

voip

2 Answers

  1. I don't have any personal experience with this, beyond being the user of such a system (I don't manage the voice system at work). What I do know is that it's possible, because we do it. Though we do NYC<->LON/AMS and not US<->AU. I suggest you invest in a decent link between the site, with guaranteed bandwith and latency. As Michael says, you can't outrun the speed of light. Fortunately that's fairly irrelevant, as light travels quite fast compared to human speech, even for such distances. You just want to make sure you know you're not going too slow.

    (btw, I'd really suggest you go trans-pacific, not trans-atlantic :))

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  2. Have you tried some simple tests to determine what the latency is between the 2 locations? If you haven't got anything there right now you could try using speedtest.net (a bit brutal but it will give you an idea) and choosing an ISP in the right city. Obviously whatever ISP you end up with may vary.

    From http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/QoS -

    Callers usually notice roundtrip voice delays of 250ms or more. ITU-T G.114 recommends a maximum of a 150 ms one-way latency. Since this includes the entire voice path, part of which may be on the public Internet, your own network should have transit latencies of considerably less than 150 ms.

    (emphasis mine)

    I can only give my personal experience which is largely limited to UK <> US East coast, in that I have never known any issues and that's over a VPN with no special concern at all for the SIP traffic.

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