Trans-atlantic VOIP

We're a Canadian business on the east coast and will soon be opening up a new call centre in Australia. This new call centre will be handling our graveyard shift and will be overlapping with the current call centre. As such, I'd need to be able to (SIP) forward calls from our North American Asterisk PBX to Australia.

I'm thinking this may be a problem as it'd require 2+ trans-atlantic trips and would therefore cause a pretty hefty latency on all such calls.

Does anyone have any experience with this ? Or alternative implementations to suggest ?

:: Edit :: Would having a local Australian SIP trunk to provide local numbers cause additional issues ?

Solution 1:

I don't have any personal experience with this, beyond being the user of such a system (I don't manage the voice system at work). What I do know is that it's possible, because we do it. Though we do NYC<->LON/AMS and not US<->AU. I suggest you invest in a decent link between the site, with guaranteed bandwith and latency. As Michael says, you can't outrun the speed of light. Fortunately that's fairly irrelevant, as light travels quite fast compared to human speech, even for such distances. You just want to make sure you know you're not going too slow.

(btw, I'd really suggest you go trans-pacific, not trans-atlantic :))