Week 3 (19-23 April 2010)

Continuing last week's incomplete work, I carried on with the practical test on IP phone. In order to use the physical IP phone which was actually Linksys SPA 912, I had to configure the settings in the server provided. each physical phone has its own server which was provided by SIPURA. After configuring, calls can be made to and from a softphone.

Figure : Configuration in SIPURA (each IP phone as its own server )

Once I am done with that task, my supervisor gave another three topics to do research on. The topics are IVR Customization, Find Me/Follow Me and also 3-Party Voice Conferencing.

IVR Customization

IVR stands for Interactive Voice Response. It is the technology that we use everyday when we call a bank or a hospital or any large business. It is the voice activated prompts that brings us to the correct person or gives us the answer we want. IVR automates inbound call routing and fosters self-service.The whole process of placing an order by the caller, and checking the status with the help of the order number can be automated with the customized IVR flow. During wait time or hold time, messages about other products and promotional offers can also be played allowing you to capitalize on cross-selling and up-selling opportunities.

Figure : IVR Customization Application

Find Me/Follow Me

Find me and follow me are two call forwarding services that are commonly used in conjunction with each other. Find me service allows the user to receive calls at any location; follow me service allows the user to be reached at any of several phone numbers.

Find me / follow me is often used in IP telephony. In some systems, the user is assigned a virtual phone number. When that number is dialed the system routes the call through a user-defined list of numbers. The numbers may be called simultaneously or sequentially, either in a preferred order or in accordance with the user's scheduled activities and locations. Once the list has been called and no connection made, the system may route the call to voice mail.

In a unified messaging system (UMS), find me / follow me may route messages among VoIP, voice email, fax and text messaging applications.

Figure : Auto attendant/IVR, find me/follow me and failover support.

3-Party Voice Conferencing

Voice conferencing is one of the most critical elements of group communication. Excellent voice quality is essential for both voice-only calls and visual communication environments, ensuring that everyone can clearly hear and be heard to improve productivity and deliver a seamless, natural communications experience.
Below are the steps to setup a third-party conferencing service to be the main audio conference solution:

1. As the host, enter the meeting room.
2. Select the Meeting menu.
3. Select Set phone conference options. The Phone Conference Options appears.
4. Select Other.
5. Enter the conference number.
6. Enter the participant code.
7. Enter the Moderator code.
8. Click OK.

Week 2 ( 12 - 16 APRIL 2010)

This week, I did more research on Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) as this will be one of the most important criteria in more work to come in the future.

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is an IETF-defined signaling protocol, widely used for controlling multimedia communication sessions such as voice and video calls over Internet Protocol (IP). The protocol can be used for creating, modifying and terminating two-party (unicast) or multiparty (multicast) sessions consisting of one or several media streams. The modification can involve changing addresses or ports, inviting more participants, adding or deleting media streams, etc... Other feasible application examples include video conferencing, streaming multimedia distribution, instant messaging, presence information, file transfer and online games.

SIP responses are the codecs used by SIP for communication. The codecs that I focused was g729, g726 and g711.

Figure : SIP Configuration

After the research on SIP was done, more practical test was done thoroughly on this topic. The company, Superceed Sdn Bhd has its own Asterisk Server. All the settings for the SIP can be done here. Therfore, I was asked to create an SIP account for my own in the Asterisk Server provided. Using this account, I was able to proceed to conduct other practical test.

This week, using the account created, I used to test IP phone that was downloaded online. Ther are two types of IP teelphony, physical IP phone and also SIP phone.

Figure : Zoiper and XLite Softphones

Figure : Physical IP phone

The softphones can be downloaded from the net meanwhile the physical IP phone was provided by the company. Using these Ip phone and the SIP account created from the Asterisk Server, I created an dextension to b registered in the IP phone. The main objective of this task is to make phone calls from one extension to another exxtension using IP phone. Other than that, I also had the chance to experiment various ways to use the softphone in multi ways and was able to set the mailbox number for the IP phone which would be 8888.

Besides that, I also learned about Host Media Processing (HMP). Dialogic HMP software performs media processing tasks on general-purpose servers without requiring the use of specialized hardware.

The next day, I was exposed to Welltech 6500 and Wellrec 5600. Welltech is the IP PBX system to operate on a variety of VoIP applications. The Welltech WellCIP 6500 series SIP Telephony server is the best choice to convergence VoIP network which convert the requirements from enterprise to service provider. Wellrec 5600 is a VoIP recoder for Welltech SIP network architecture.

The last day of the week, I have learnt bout Interactive Voice Response (IVR).Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is a technology that allows a computer to detect voice and dual-tone multi-frequency signaling (DTMF) keypad inputs. IVR technology is used extensively in telecommunication, but is also being introduced into automobile systems for hands-free operation. Current deployment in automobiles revolves around satellite navigation, audio and mobile phone systems. In telecommunications, IVR allows customers to access a company’s database via a telephone keypad or by speech recognition, after which they can service their own inquiries by following the instructions. IVR systems can respond with pre-recorded or dynamically generated audio to further direct users on how to proceed. IVR systems can be used to control almost any function where the interface can be broken down into a series of simple menu choices. In telecommunications applications, such as customer support lines, IVR systems generally scale well to handle large call volumes.