What's Different about Bluestone's Technology?
This page overviews the current approaches to providing a hosted PBX solution, discusses their pro and cons and then describes why Bluestone's cloud solution is a fundamental improvement in approach.
Cost vs Quality
The Cost vs Quality dilemma has been approached by providers in one of two ways:
- High End: Install a dedicated T1 + other equipment to ensure that quality expectations can be met. The flip side is that the monthly cost of the phones is in the region of $50 to $90 per month. This is just too expensive for the majority of companies.
- Low End: Roll the dice and hope that the customer has a decent connection from their offices to your servers. This approach keeps down the cost, but often results in call quality that is unacceptable.
Delivering Quality at an Affordable Price.
Bluestone has been working on its cloud based solution since 2007, and now has the means of breaking through this "Cost vs Quality" barrier. The principals of the approach are:
- The last mile is often NOT the problem,
- Navigating from one ISP to another usually is.
- Providing customers with access to multiple locations on multiple networks frequently resolves this quality problem.
Bluestone's nationwide network really leverages the Cloud
delivering best possible voice quality.
Optimizing routing makes all the difference
As an illustration of just what an impact routing can have, look at the chart below. This is a measurement of packet loss and packet jitter, from a customer's location within ten miles of our Albany data center to the Albany, Washington DC and Seattle data centers.
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A plot from a fixed customer location to three different data centers, illustrating the impact of route optimization.
You would expect the geographically closest facility to offer the best results, but many times that's not the case. In order to get from the customer's ISP to our Albany backbone provider (Level3) packets were being routed through many more miles of fiber than they were to get to the Washington DC data center. Even worse the connection to Albany was being made via routers that were often overload resulting in major packet jitter and consequently poor voice quality.
In the chart above the blue line represents the "Mean Opinion Score" (MOS) and its an industry metric for measuring voice quality. Anything above the green horizontal line represents an acceptable voice quality, anything below it and the voice quality is noticeably impaired. The red arrows mark periods where call quality fell below the acceptable call quality threshold. As you can see using the Washington DC servers dramatically improved the delivered voice quality - even though the "last mile" was obviously the same throughout.
How do we determine which data center to use for you?
During the sign up process as ask you run a test that measures all the required parameters from your location to our network. This test tells us where to connect you. It might also tells us that your current ISP cannot provide the quality of service necessary, and you need to find a new one. Either way you have a concrete measurement, done on your location that determines the quality of service we will deliver- no rolling of the dice, no hoping everything will be OK, we measure it for free ahead of time. (There is a much simplified version of this test you can run here).
Bluestone (to the best of our knowledge) is the only provider that has this facility. So if you want a great service at a great price, go to the sign up section and fill out the simple site evaluation form. Again the site evaluation is free.