By the time you read this article, the Communications Solutions
Conference and Expo and Planet PDA shows in Boston will be history.
Normally, the most fun aspect of a show is the event itself. Sure it can
be exhausting to walk up and down the aisles, but one gets to meet so many
people from various companies offering new and exciting products. For me
the fun often begins a few weeks prior to the show. One of this years
show sponsors was interested in showcasing their VoIP gateway product on
our Web site. It was time for us to practice what we preach and VoIP
enable our site. (Not to mention that we were getting the gateway for
free, which was an added incentive for us.) Frankly, I was at first
skeptical about this project. With other projects piling up in the queue,
I wasnt in the mood to tackle a complicated assignment. To my surprise
this one ended up being painless and fun.
We have had PC-to-PC chatting on our site in the past, but that
required for our people to be ready by their multimedia-capable PCs to
handle the voice chat. The problem was that most people who found out
about our company did so by reaching our Web site, but telephones are
still the preferred equipment to make business deals. So what we wanted
was an easy to install and manage gateway that could interface with our
PBX.
Enter the companys proposal to do just that. First they sent me a
starter two-port PCI card and a CDROM containing the driver and other
associated software. The hunt was on to find a spare PC to use as the
gateway. Thankfully, this product didnt need a lot of horsepower, so I
ended up using an old Pentium II 233 MHz with 64 MB RAM running Windows
2000. Upon installing the card, I faced some minor problems with the
driver, but the techies at the company soon had me up and running. My next
problem was finding two free analog ports on our PBX. Those of you who
support your companys PBX on a part time basis would understand that
finding two free analog ports in a maze of badly punched-down wires is not
an easy task. But there was no choice. Installing the gateway forced me to
trace and identify every analog port coming out of the PBX. To my
surprise, and contrary to my belief that we had no free analog ports, I
was able to find and tag four free ones. After programming two of them for
the gateway and plugging them in, I installed and ran the software that
operated the board and handled the connections. Next I connected the
gateway to our internal network, opening a pathway on our firewall for the
gateway to have http access to and from the Internet. The final step was
installing the required client-side software on our Web server and an
image for the caller to click on and initiate the call. Configuring the
product was as easy as editing an XML file to connect Web callers to our
desired extensions on the PBX.
With everything in place I fired up my Web browser and attempted to
make a call through the gateway. No go! After some fiddling with the
various parts of the gateway, it was determined that the firewall was the
culprit. Well, actually I was the culprit for not configuring the firewall
correctly. At that point, I decided to move the gateway in front of the
firewall. Not only would I have saved myself the hassle of firewall
configuration, but the gateway would have been off our internal network.
In our case, if it were hacked, no precious data would have been lost. Of
course this was a temporary solution. If the system were in some way
compromised, it would have meant downtime for a critical customer
interface. This time, the gateway worked but the sound quality wasnt so
great, until I moved the gateway to a less congested T1 circuit. At the
compression rate of 12kbps, the sound quality was good and delay, jitter,
and echo were relatively under control. I tried calling into the gateway
from home where my dial-up speed barely breaks 28.8 kbps. I was happy to
experience decent sound quality from there as well. So far we have
received several outside calls through the gateway and they all have gone
smoothly.
The product that we used, Click2Ring (www.click2ring.com),
has a starting retail price of $1,495 for a two analog port board,
although the company has other boards with higher capacities. The company
also supports other modes such as accounting, and remote office
connections but I was happy enough to have easily interfaced our PBX to
the Internet.
With Internet telephony reaching new levels of maturity and quality,
integrating it into the telecommunications infrastructure is becoming more
and more inevitable. Our experiment proved that interfacing Internet
telephony with traditional telecom equipment is not as complicated as some
may believe. Let us know how your experiments in Internet telephony turn
out.
Robert Vahid Hashemian provides us with a healthy dose of reality
every other month in his Reality Check column. Robert is Webmaster for
TMCnet.com your online resource for CTI, Internet telephony, and call
center solutions. He is also the author of the recently published Financial Markets For The Rest Of Us.
He can be reached at rhashemian@tmcnet.com.
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