Re: Business Case

[Sven Ubik <>]

We have an IP telephony network inter-connecting 12 universities
and connecting them all to PSTN. All calls are accounted using our
own accounting software (runs on Linux, processes RADIUS messages from
voice gateways, stores them in MySQL and presents in HTML/PHP4 interface).
Calls from one university to another are free. Calls to PSTN are paid.
We are charged by our PSTN operator, split the bill using the accounting
software and charge the universities. As we are a whosale customer for
the PSTN operator, we get lower than usual call prices. About 25% calls
are from one university to another (IP-only), the rest goes to PSTN.
People in one university calculated that if all their calls went through
our IP telephony network (either to another university or to PSTN),
they would pay off the cost of their voice gateway in 6 months. However,
this is not the case as many people call directly to PSTN. And that
calculation was based on prices of PSTN calls in our country where PSTN
services are still effectively monopolized. I think that it is rather
difficult to make IP telephony network profitable in a country with a
competitive PSTN market. We installed our network as part of our research
project so we did not intend to be profitable, but at least we are able
to offset part of our investment to this project. There is some more
information about our network at:

http://www.cesnet.cz/english/project/iptelephony

Sven

-----------------------------------------
Sven Ubik,   http://staff.cesnet.cz/~ubik



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