If I where going to establish an ITSP and chose to build my own network, what would be involved? What costs would be associated with this? Would a managed solution be a better option?
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This really depends on what features you want to offer and the number of subscribers you want to support. The customer premises equipment (analog telephony adapters, IP phones, or SIP to PSTN gateway) that you'll offer or recommend will depend upon whether you're going to target the residential or business market. What a lot of ITSPs do today is customize an open source solution such as the SIP Express Router (SER) from IPTel.org. The cost of this depends upon how much time you spend on customization and what hardware you decide to run on. You have to rent some space at a data centre for your solution and you would likely want to establish redundant servers. You would likely then go out and develop partnerships with different carriers and negotiate rates for terminating calls through their network to the PSTN. Before providing your offering, you'll likely want to come up with a nice interface so that customers can access all information over the web, such as current billing and account information.
This was first published in November 2004