To outsource or not to outsorce?

[George]

Do you lease bridging services or host conferences locally on your own MCU?

Many companies including various organizations throughout DoD struggle with this question as well. On one hand, local hosting all but guarantees that you'll be able to schedule on-demand conferences and provides more local control over your call. However the tremendous costs and lack of expertise afforded to you when running your own MCU can be a bit daunting as well.

What solution do you use? A combination of both? Undecided? discuss it here.

[William]

I think things are changing in this space. Companies like Codian (www.codian.com) are selling a really high end MCU, which is very easy to manage, for under $30k. Use a service provider like Masergy (www.masergy.com) to give you a QOS network with VPN for under $1,000 per month, put the MCU in the Masergy colocation facility, use IPV Gateways (www.ipvgateways.com) to get your ISDN access.

You then have the ability to do point to point or multipoint conference calls 24 hours a day, at 768kbs, awsome quality and no per usage fees.

[George]

Wow that sounds like a heck of a good deal. Especially with 768k call quality. However I think that might be a little too costly for some to invest in a lump sum like that. I also wonder what the monthly costs for all that bandwidth would be.

[MarvinK]

Hmm, Codian.com eh. Think I'll check that out.

[tjulian]

I think you have to do a cost vs. benfits analysis on the situation...we like to do that for everything in the Army.

If you need the capablity to schedule a conference on demand, have multiple conferences per day, or support many customers who have conferences quite often (like the DOIM on an Army installation), then I would reccomend the purchase of your own MCU.

If you only need it two to three times a week, yeah, lease the time. It's cheaper.

We end up using our MGC-100 for various DOD organizations across the country, so the benefits have definitely outweighed the costs...

[mazzarak]

There is the alternative of purchasing your own bridge and getting a bridging company to manage it on your behalf - this way you get the best of both worlds, being able to use your own IP network, but being able to hold a provider responisble for the conferences themselves.

[William]

There is the alternative of purchasing your own bridge and getting a bridging company to manage it on your behalf

Can you refer me to some companies that will do this for me ?

[George]

William,

Commercial, gov, edu, or medical?

Why not do an intro in the "Introductions" forum to let us know a little more about you too :)

[Vtech]

I agree with julian, Where I workl we do a lot of on demand stuff we also use a outsourced bridging system. Our system is 100% ISDN and there are a lot of Leased line sites that use This service so they "bridge the gap" for us. If you don't have a need to talked to may sites on a last minute request than I would outsource my bridging.

[New Zealand Warrior]

Guys,

I have an MGC-50 here in New Zealand and offer out to customers Webcommander logins so that no matter where they are in the world they can take advantage of NZ cheap bridging rates and ISDN.. e.g. $50 per port per hour.. or thats about 20 pound.. and call costs can be seen at www.telecom.co.nz/videoconferencing

So if you want to manage your own conferences or if you want us to mange them for you, just send me an email and ill help you out.

keith.block@telecom.co.nz

New Zealand Warrior