Softphone

[fisamo]

At the risk of incurring the wrath of those wanting to know how their calls are routed, perhaps your server naming convention should not directly indicate geography. Should you choose to 'code' in geography, that would be your call, but since network distance is often quite different than geographic distance, I'd suggest that you avoid (or obscure) geographic server designations.

voice1.voipwelcome.com
voip1.voipwelcome.com
sip1.voipwelcome.com

If you wanted to code by geography (or data center),
voice0101 - server #1 in data center #1
voice0305 - server #3 in data center #5
voiceht01 - server #1 in Houston
voiceff03 - server #3 in Fairfax, VA
voicerm02 - server #2 in Redmond, WA

The challenge here is to give people useful information without maybe nice to know but probably unimportant information that could cause undue confusion.

An open question:
I am a cable subscriber, and let's say for discussion that I get 20ms pings to sip.voipwelcome.com. Is it not possible (perhaps even likely) that should my next-door neighbor have a DSL connection, they could see 100ms pings to the same server, simply because they use a different ISP and traffic gets routed differently? 'Worse' yet, if my ISP is Earthlink over TWC and my neighbor is a TWC Road Runner customer (presuming we're on the same cable node), could our ping times differ? Would they necessarily be the same for two customers on the same node with the same ISP? (I'm assuming that to be the most likely case that they'd be the same... )

Also, thinking about the 'server roulette' discussions that went on with ViaTalk for a while, there were numerous posts on DSLR about 'richmond-1c' actually being the same box as 'chicago-1i' or similar. It seems to me that discussions like that are more distracting than they are helpful.

Edit to add: The primary reasons I can think of for a user to know which server they're connected with are (1) those able and choosing to use a softphone and wanting incoming calls to work properly, and (2) customers calling in a genuine trouble and being able to tell support that they're on server abc123, and their MWI is stuck or they get horrible latency, etc. Or, it's additional information they can include in a trouble ticket (though support should be able to look it up). Honestly, I think support should (in general) be trained to NOT switch users to a particular server upon request. You (voipo) should be able to manage which server the user is on, based on your knowledge of network loads, etc., not joe user randomly pinging server abc123 and finding a slightly faster connection than to server 789xyz...

[sr98user]

An open question:
I am a cable subscriber, and let's say for discussion that I get 20ms pings to sip.voipwelcome.com. Is it not possible (perhaps even likely) that should my next-door neighbor have a DSL connection, they could see 100ms pings to the same server, simply because they use a different ISP and traffic gets routed differently? 'Worse' yet, if my ISP is Earthlink over TWC and my neighbor is a TWC Road Runner customer (presuming we're on the same cable node), could our ping times differ? Would they necessarily be the same for two customers on the same node with the same ISP? (I'm assuming that to be the most likely case that they'd be the same... )

It all depends on the "Peering" for that ISP backbone. See the following for details

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering

There are about 8 NAPs in major cities around the country. That's where the switching happens. If the source and destination has peering happens close to you then you will get lower ping times and lower number of hops. Major providers have equipment in the NAP.

Regarding Earthlink, its been a while, but I think TWC provides only the cable. DNS, routers, DHCP server are all different for Earthlink and RR. But I would think peering will happen in the closest NAP.

BTW, my ping times are about 50-60ms and I don't have any problems with the SIP servers.

[fisamo]

Thanks for the information. I can confirm that TWC only provides the cable, as my IP address resolves to a cable-(insert-random-looking-characters-here).mindspring.com, and for a while, I was getting the Earthlink DNS redirection search page when firing up my work PC at home (home page is to our intranet).