How Difficult is It to Host Your Own SIP Based Dialer?

[pmontanez]

Well, why do you want to do SIP trunking yourself when there are loads of providers available to just buy minutes from, Xcast and Point1 being a few. They are SIP compliant and handle far end media traversal as well as efficient in converting VoIP to PSTN and vice versa.....I suggest you go that path rather than try and do the trunking as it might get complicated.

Being a techie myself I really appreciate the effort you have put in and sounds good, I do agree that companies are springing up here and there making a dialer. A dialer is just not something that picks up a lead and dials, there is more to it and that's where the real ROI is......best time to call, timezone calling, abandonment checks, state rules compliance, recordings, dashboards, Barge in, Coach, List prioritization, choosing best number of a lead at a time of the day.....can get pretty complex and some complex algo's come into play.

I myself have been associated with 3CLogic for long, we developed this unique VTAG (Virtual Telephony application Grid) that allows us to scale like no other solution. Distribution is our key, agent PC's computing power is used to simulate a large central dialer.

Do check out 3clogic website to learn more or google on health insurance 3clogic, register and get someone give you a call, agent UI and dialer customized for the Health Insurance Domain.

Hope this helps

I think he does not want to complicate with billing issues due to Trunk termination charges, I'm running a small Beta testing of a similar product, and billing still holding me down from production.

 

[ksigmtsu]

I want to do a per minute billing where all I am doing is supplying the trunking from 3 vendors I like, then letting the agents have a discounted rate because we're getting a discounted rate.

The problem is, vicidial doesn't have a good way to calculate this data, it lacks even the basic accounting. There is a hidden function called "calling card" which we think was intended to be used for that, but it isn't known to even work.

Matt MIGHT be working on it, I think we found a workaround method that would work but it has to be programmed by hand.

I wanted to give people a hosted dialer for 30$ a month so I could cover the server cost, plus 1.5 cents a minute for talk time only, which does not count dialing time. It is VERY cheap to use a dialer billed like that, would cost 40-50 bucks a month for your average person.

 

[pmontanez]

I'm following your thread, and to be honest with you I'm excited to find someone with the same passion to bring technology to the insurance industry at the agency level. You help me out with some coding regarding Vici-Sugar integration (still not make it work, but yet close). I'm developing a website that It would help to provide Virtual Support Staff primary for Allstate Agencies (being Myself an Agent as well)( We Call Them For You | Agency Virtual Support Staff - Callthem Front ) I'm using vicidial to accomplish this but still having a few problems- I see that you want to offer the hosted version of the dialing- Did you experience any problems with voice quality when 4 or 5 agents are connected to the system outside from your LAN any latency problems ??
Also, I'm very interested on your project, I think that it has a tremendous potential. and I would like to offer my help in anything that you may need..

Thanks again

 

[ksigmtsu]

the guy hosting the colo claims no problem without the sangoma module, with a 5x5 on a quad 4 with pretty high specs.

We haven't put one under sufficient load personally to answer.

 

[Josh]

For the lousy $66 the timing source seems like a reasonable investment ( Call Center Service Group, LC - Purchase ).

I have my system on a 15/3 cable connection (two machines with 4 dual core xeons, one with 8gb of ram and one with 4gb of ram with hardware controlled RAID plus a dual core machine with 4gb of ram with dual sata drives, also hardware RAID) with a timing card. I haven't stress tested it too hard, but I had over a dozen callers on one machine with a quad core AMD chip, 4 GB of RAM and a single SATA drive and a timing card at a colo site with 5 up and 5 down without a problem.

 

[ksigmtsu]

If it becomes necessary I wouldnt try to save 66 dollars

 

[pmontanez]

For the lousy $66 the timing source seems like a reasonable investment ( Call Center Service Group, LC - Purchase ).

I have my system on a 15/3 cable connection (two machines with 4 dual core xeons, one with 8gb of ram and one with 4gb of ram with hardware controlled RAID plus a dual core machine with 4gb of ram with dual sata drives, also hardware RAID) with a timing card. I haven't stress tested it too hard, but I had over a dozen callers on one machine with a quad core AMD chip, 4 GB of RAM and a single SATA drive and a timing card at a colo site with 5 up and 5 down without a problem.

Are you making any recordings? I have no problems with up to 8-10 agents but when I start recording calls - latency and sound problems begins as few as 4 agents get into the system - I do have and outside server for recordings and modify the crontab to do the file conversion and upload at 1am but still having issues.. I'm reviewing asterisk cli and couldn't found any peak performance problem - Is it really get better with the timing card ???

 

[Josh]

I am, that's what the third server is for. On the single machine I couldn't do the recordings with that many callers without serious issues.

I had to get a timing card when I got to 5+ agents. For $66 I think it's a solid investment.

 

[Lisa26]

I would rather use something that is out there rather than develop new one. Also it depends on how much time you have.

 

[yomomma]

I installed from the VICI iso, and seems to have gone well. I heard within the VOIP community that the box has to be cloaked somewhat for fear of hacking your VOIP accounts. Heard stories of people being charged thousands in a few hours.