If SIP or IAX, what codec will you use?
[/quote]
SIP, a lightweight codec like G.711 or G.726 (32).
[/quote]
Danger! Are you going to be doing this through a trunk? And are you still planning on using vicidial? No way! You have the right idea with g711u (ulaw), since that won’t have to be transcoded by the meetme conferences. However, then you’re running into bandwidth problems. If you’re going to be doing this for your agents, you better hope they’re on a local network!
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Since you didn’t ready just a couple posts up I’ll tell you that he said he was using E1s for connection not VOIP trunks. VOIP over even an 100 Mbit network can handle 600 conversations easily on a local LAN. We have installations using remote agents and the GSM codec with no audio quality issues.
I did not know this would matter. Probably softphone, but whats the difference?
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Hardphone. Your agents will thank you.
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I completely agree, although softphones often don’t cost anything or are much less expensive than hardphones. We use all hardphones.
Yes.
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Anyone know if call recordings happen on separate threads? If so, you may be in luck…
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It does, but there is a practical limit to how many concurrent conversations you can record in Asterisk. In theory you could do over 100 concurrent recordings, but this doesn’t translate well into reality. We limit ours to 50 concurrent recordings per server and have no issues with quality. When we went higher than that(60) we started to have issues with skipping recordings. Many others have seen this as well on the asterisk-users list.
Yes.
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If you mess with settings enough, you should be able to block out 75% of answering machines.
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That has been our experience as well, the app_amd module included with SVN asterisk now works very well and is the same code used by Aheeva in their dialer.
What are the CPU stats(speed/cache/bus) and RAM of the server?
[/quote]
Two Dual Core Xeons, 2x2MB Cache, 2.8GHz, 800MHz FSB. 4GB RAM.
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Blast, you just lost a lot of points there. Are these the hyperthreaded xeon models (so it looks like you have 4 processing threads)? If so, you’re in for a bad bad headache. Since most of what you’re wanting to do happens in a single processing thread, a hyperthreaded machine will slow you down. A lot. You really should have gone for a powerful single-core or dual-core opteron without hyperthreading (assuming your xeons are hyperthreaded).
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We use all Hyperthreading servers in our installations and have no problems with them. They offer a small performance boost over non-HT.
Raid, 146GB 15K RPM Ultra 320 SCSI Hard
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pretty . That’ll purr like a kitten!
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Those are about the best you can buy
[quote=“squinky86”]
Whew! That’s a relief![/quote]
What country are you located in?
Fair enough, I was planning on having 2 to 3 E1’s per Asterisk server (meaning max of 60 to 90 lines), and a powerfull server. You believe the HW I speced out earlier in the thread will not be enough for this?
We have development capacity. We can solve problems on our own or implement our own dialer + crm.
The other open source dialer, gnudialer, also uses meetme rooms. Do you have suggestions for better techniques?
The former.
Not at present.
Good to know. Tx.
[quote=“squinky86”]
What you will need for such a large undertaking is a commercial-quality dialer. There are a number of such dialers, and a couple come to mind that would work for what you want to do. If you’re interested, look around or feel free to contact me (I’m almost always on irc under this name) to discuss your options. I just don’t want you to blow a bunch of money on vicidial and hardware only to find out a different, better solution is available.[/quote]
I appreciate your help. One of our clients requirements is to avoid paying per agent licensing costs. Do you know of any offerings that have a flat price?
Yes, I understand how that works. All agents will be on a properly switched LAN.
Right, the question is how much CPU will that gobble?
That is disturbing. Surely Asterisk is multi-threaded? We will have 2 dual core Xeons, so 4 real CPU’s for Asterisk to sprawl on. Are you saying that it will only take advantage of one?
If the 200 seats are local, you won’t have much problem. If they’re not, you’ll run into bandwidth issues. A few clients needed g729 codecs to help curb bandwidth costs, but then weren’t able to place as many calls through due to the meetmes transcoding.
[quote=“mflorell”]Yes, you would need quite a few servers to handle it, but with the features offered by using meetme rooms are not easily duplicated with an Agents-centric setup like 3-way 4way calls, DTMF macros, manager barge-in and entire-session recording of an agent.
[/quote]
You’re right, but these can be duplicated as-needed if the dialer system were to transfer the agent and client to a meetme before doing most of these things, as many proprietary dialers that are much more efficient than vicidial do. As for dtmf macros, look in the trunk for a playdtmf manager action: that can be sent down the necessary legs of the call.
I have only seen this while using a high-compression codec like G729. We have not seen any issues with call quality on any of our systems using G711 or GSM for trunks. For G729 users we usually recommend using a gateway if possible for large installations.[/quote]
I can agree with that, but gsm in general is going to sound worse. g711 is going to suck more bandwidth.
[quote=“mflorell”][quote=“squinky86”]
4) Ask yourself, will you want the agents to be immediately connected to the person called, or would you like the choice of being able to play a pre-recorded message and have the potential client have the option of talking to an agent? If you choose the later, then vicidial is not for you.
[/quote]
There is the option of doing this now with VICIDIAL. I don’t know where you are getting this stuff.
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I’m going to disagree with you. While options are there, it’s impossible to build a dialplan or complex ivr-like tree with vicidial, as most of the clients I’ve worked with want to do. When clients get into this area, they’re going to need to spend even more money on customizing vicidial and the dialplan for what they want to do. These development costs often require more money than a proprietary dialer would cost.
What CRM do you use that transfers calls? You can easily use the WEB FORM to access customer data from your CRM by an agent on a call. We use this to do screen-pops of the CRM record when a customer calls into our system. Works very well for us.[/quote]
Vicidial will lose track of the call, especially in call recordings. I’ve worked with many custom crms that made vicidial lose the call, while proprietary dialers I know of have a crm-layer that is built to work seemlessly with the crm.
[quote=“mflorell”][quote=“squinky86”]
What you will need for such a large undertaking is a commercial-quality dialer. There are a number of such dialers, and a couple come to mind that would work for what you want to do. If you’re interested, look around or feel free to contact me (I’m almost always on irc under this name) to discuss your options. I just don’t want you to blow a bunch of money on vicidial and hardware only to find out a different, better solution is available.[/quote]
First of all, I will say that VICIDIAL is not for everyone. If you want to save millions of dollars over a proprietary system,[/quote]
Where in the world did “millions” come from? There are a number of proprietary dialers I’ve helped shipped out that were more cost-effective than a customized vicidial would have been.
Where in the world are you getting your data? Please stop overselling vicidial on price. Remember development fees alone can overload your pocket book. Vicidial takes a lot of time to set up, especially for so many agents, while proprietary dialers I know of are much faster and integrated, and you won’t have to spend…dare I say it… “millions of dollars in development fees alone”. (yes, I’m being facetious there, sorry for picking on you, but ‘millions’ is way too much of an overstatement.
Again, where in the world are you getting your information from? Most proprietary dialers I’ve worked with allow the client to customize a number of features, and leave them in FULL control of configuration.
Again, customizing vicidial comes at a price.
I don’t know where you’re getting a lot of your estimates, mflorell, and vicidial may be fine for samwise, but I fear you’re overselling vicidial to him- making him think it’s going to work flawlessly and magically for what he wants to do for a price he can afford. If it works fine for you, samwise, PLEASE report back on how you did everything!!! We’d love to hear what you did and what problems you ran in to.
[quote=“samwise”][quote=“squinky86”]
Danger! Are you going to be doing this through a trunk? And are you still planning on using vicidial? No way! You have the right idea with g711u (ulaw), since that won’t have to be transcoded by the meetme conferences. However, then you’re running into bandwidth problems. If you’re going to be doing this for your agents, you better hope they’re on a local network!
[/quote]
Yes, I understand how that works. All agents will be on a properly switched LAN.[/quote]
Yay!
[quote=“samwise”][quote=“squinky86”]
If you mess with settings enough, you should be able to block out 75% of answering machines.
[/quote]
Right, the question is how much CPU will that gobble?[/quote]
Shouldn’t notice it too much, since these will run on different threads than the main asterisk cores.
[quote=“samwise”][quote=“squinky86”]
Blast, you just lost a lot of points there. Are these the hyperthreaded xeon models (so it looks like you have 4 processing threads)? If so, you’re in for a bad bad headache. Since most of what you’re wanting to do happens in a single processing thread, a hyperthreaded machine will slow you down. A lot. You really should have gone for a powerful single-core or dual-core opteron without hyperthreading (assuming your xeons are hyperthreaded).
[/quote]
That is disturbing. Surely Asterisk is multi-threaded? We will have 2 dual core Xeons, so 4 real CPU’s for Asterisk to sprawl on. Are you saying that it will only take advantage of one?[/quote]
Ah, dual-core is fine. Hyperthreaded is not. As long as you don’t turn it on and each core is hyperthreaded, you should be fine. I still prefer opterons for vicidial installs in general, mostly because I like pipelining code and most of the comparable intel systems are hyperthreaded, which will actually hurt you tremendously in a vicidial install. That having been said, I have one client I’m working with today with a couple pentium3 cores. One core is handling all the asterisk stuff, while the other runs the vicidial scripts. This seems to work fine, except that he’s having to transcode due to bandwidth limitations. The one core handling the big asterisk transcoding spikes to 80% usage, while the core handling the scripts barely reaches a few percent usage. This is why a non-hyperthreaded opteron (including the dual-core variety) outperforms the hyperthreaded intel equivalents- with only one thread on each core, linux can better pipeline a single process (like the resource-intensive asterisk parts). I’ve also noticed considerable responsiveness with 64-bit installs. Benchmarks on vicidial with 64-bit opterons and 32-bit installs on the same opterons show a considerable improvement in the 64-bit variety.
In conclusion, you will want as much power as you can squeeze out of your servers for the number of agents you want. 64-bit linux on opterons will serve you well for vicidial. If you go with vicidial, this is the way to go! I didn’t mean to scare you away from vicidial, I’ve just had too many clients want things vicidial can’t do, especially clients as big and bigger (I’m working with one right now with 460 seats and enough power for quite a few more, non-vicidial) than what you want to do. It’s just everyone on this forum is so quick to recommend vicidial, and I’ve seen more than one person blow a lot of money on vicidial, only to move to proprietary dialer systems in less than a month. I DON’T want to see that happen again. Samwise, you’re going to need a consultant to sit down with and talk to about exactly what you want to do and how you want to do it. Go shopping- get a couple opinions. My opinion doesn’t matter to what you want to do, neither does mflorell’s. Don’t let either of us tell you what you want- talk to a consultant and tell them what you want. They will then give you estimates and what exactly can and can’t be done.
Where in the world are you getting your data? Please stop overselling vicidial on price. Remember development fees alone can overload your pocket book. Vicidial takes a lot of time to set up, especially for so many agents, while proprietary dialers I know of are much faster and integrated, and you won’t have to spend…dare I say it… “millions of dollars in development fees alone”. (yes, I’m being facetious there, sorry for picking on you, but ‘millions’ is way too much of an overstatement.
Again, where in the world are you getting your information from? Most proprietary dialers I’ve worked with allow the client to customize a number of features, and leave them in FULL control of configuration.
[/quote]
2 years ago we were quoted $950,000 for an Avaya solution for 200 seats. That was one year of licensing and setup costs. We also received quotes from Stratasoft and Concerto that were in line with the $200-$400 per seat per month licensing costs, not including service contracts and hardware. These are three very large commercial call center software manufacturers each with thousands of installed sites and ALL of them would charge more than $2 million dollars for a 600 seat call center. That’s where the “millions” comes from. What proprietary solution do you recommend?
Again, customizing vicidial comes at a price.
I don’t know where you’re getting a lot of your estimates, mflorell, and vicidial may be fine for samwise, but I fear you’re overselling vicidial to him- making him think it’s going to work flawlessly and magically for what he wants to do for a price he can afford. If it works fine for you, samwise, PLEASE report back on how you did everything!!! We’d love to hear what you did and what problems you ran in to.[/quote]
I will agree that VICIDIAL does not work flawlessy, but I have never used a commercial system that did work flawlessly and we have worked on Stratasoft, Avaya and Concerto systems that all had rather annoying flaws that we could never fix ourselves. That’s why we created VICIDIAL in the first place. If you are using VICIDIAL in a very large call center(600 seats) you will want to have people on staff to maintain it. As for price of VICIDIAL, how many top-level developers can you hire and keep on staff for $950,000 a year?
Many of those are non-asterisk solutions with rediculous fees. How about an asterisk-based solution with a proprietary dialer? Without relying on meetmes (and thus reducing hardware requirements), omegadial comes to mind. Also, there may be other dialers on the wiki that would work for what you want to do: voip-info.org/wiki/view/Predictive+dialer
I can think of a couple as mentioned previously. And vicidial is great in most settings and we push it out in most settings- I love it. I’m just worried it’s not going to scale to what samwise wants to do! Don’t mistake what I’m saying, vicidial is an amazing product with an outstanding feature set, but seriously, it will not work for samwise and this is why:
Even with ulaw, meetmes still have to transcode to s.lin. While the transocidng costs from g711u/ulaw will be minimal, it still happens in one, single thread. Even a double-dual-core xeon will not handle 600 agents, even with ulaw. See my previous posts about how many transcodings will be going on in a single thread at the same time- samwise’s server will not handle it!
Yep, but that’s a lot of possibly unneeded hardware costs. It looks like you’re trying to do this the right way, though, and I applaud you for it. Mflorell is right, vicidial will probably suit your needs just fine, especially if you’re willing to invest in this much hardware. I still highly recommend 64-bit linux on opterons, though that many xeons will be fine, too. The performance gain with this many agents will be noticeable with vicidial+athlon64.
Many of those are non-asterisk solutions with rediculous fees. How about an asterisk-based solution with a proprietary dialer? Without relying on meetmes (and thus reducing hardware requirements), omegadial comes to mind. Also, there may be other dialers on the wiki that would work for what you want to do: voip-info.org/wiki/view/Predictive+dialer
[/quote]
How much is OmegaDial? I have talked with the sales guy at your company about OmegaDial(Back in October) because the description on your site is somewhat lacking and he told me that it was focused on doing messaging and voice broadcasting, and didn’t have a rich agent interface. And that they were not installing it for clients at that time yet. Can you supply some more details about OmegaDial?
As for the other solutions on the list, I have had the most interaction and experience with Aheeva. Their largest installation is 300 seats in France and their costs are about half that of the big guys. They have had some installations in place for over 3 years on Asterisk and do contribute code regularly to the community. Their installation requirements are somewhat limiting but they do offer a full feature set and are Asterisk-based.
As I am usually the voice of dissention (not being a rabid convert and believer in a totally VOIP world) I’d like to throw in my thoughts.
The telemarkeing world in the US was flattened by legislation that required all telemarkers to remove from their dialing lists any numbers that appear on the national Do Not Call list.
Because the bottom dropped out of the business, any of the major players in the telemarketing hardware arena (Like Davox/Aspect for example) are highly motivated to make excellent deals on the products. No one is expanding, so they have to make sales happen somehow. I wouldn’t let two year old estimates put you off of a proprietary platform. The prices for the equipment, and the market for it, has changed considerably.
No, they’re not pure VOIP, or open source. But they have long track records of excellent service, can be put under maintenance contracts and when I priced them last year, turn out to be quite affordable.
Anyone who can throw 14 servers at an application would do well to investigate something more conventional. (I’m assuming that your not calling a low end dell desktop PC a “server”.) You’ll probably find the proprietary solution has a MUCH smaller footprint, (meaning lower power, cooling, real estate, and maintenance costs) is comparable in cost, high in functionality, high in reliability, easy to use, and supported by their vendor.
Remember people; There is more than one tool in the toolbox. Pick the right one for the job.
Then you saw the original one I wrote a long time ago for a client who actually had vicidial, but was wanting to scale beyond what vicidial was capable of. That client was out of the scope of vicidial, and omegadial was written not to be the same as vicidial, but to fulfill that client’s needs. No code in vicidial was referenced or made its way into omegadial- they handle basic functions very differently. It was a prototype and alpha test to what it is now to show that we can build a powerful dialer. The dialer now is not the same as the one back in october- complete rewrite. No, the agent interface itself isn’t as feature-rich as vicidial’s, but most of the features of the interface can be handled by the phone itself, especially since it’s broken out of a meetme. On top of that, agents are able to see scripts and information of the person they’re calling. Omegadial from october was rewritten in late November and early December, and development efforts stabalized in January and February. Since then, we’ve been adding many many features, including a thin crm integration layer for basically any crm you’re using. Audit shows that only 10’s of lines from the original omegadial code were kept, most pertaining to the web configuration interface.
(edit)And we’ve been shipping out this dialer to multiple clients since then. Guess it’d be good to know that it is in use .
We have searched for alternatives, namely from Avaya and Cisco. The numbers are not fully in, but so far either of them look like they are at least 3 times the cost of an asterisk based solution. Furthermore, they both bring considerable per seat costs which are something our client wants to bring down to a minimum. As for better princing deals as a result of the do not call list, that does seem to apply outside the US. The Avaya guys had the nerve to charge close to $300 for a soft phone licence. Yep, you read it right. $300. I kid you not.
Oh well, if you go to the most expensive providers in the business, your going to get the highest prices! What did you expect?
Try a Concerto from Aspect/Davox. It’s only a dialer, so, no good as a PBX too. It’s what we have. They’re quite affordable, and very good systems.
Cisco I’d stay away from. They took two years to figure out how to make music on hold work in their “PBX”. It’s only a guess, but I bet there’s similar issues in their dialer. I still don’t trust their telecom stuff.
Avaya is like any other top vendor. They always have the highest prices. But everything works. Count on it. Mission critical production systems require the highest reliability.
When figuring out your cost of ownership, don’t forget to factor in the cost of failing to meet your contractual obligations, a call center full of idle agents, and lost business because you picked the wrong production system.
By the way, (BIG HINT HERE) every “quote” you get from a vendor is negotiable. If you push back a couple of times about the cost of this or that line item, it can change quite a lot. No price is final until you sign the paperwork.
I am starting a 20 seat call centre using astreisk here in Fiji. we will use VOIP for our telemarketing calls. To get a decent call quality will 1 MB link oK or I have to get 2m link? How can we get this predictive dialing happening? Can it be possible with Asterisk. I am thinking to make my centre purely IP based. Will you be able to give some advise on this?
it(VICIDIAL) relies on meetme conferences, which is another leg of the call to handle. To show you what I mean, first multiply 600 agents by 2, since each agent will need both their leg of the call, and the meetme leg of the call. Then, how many calls would you expect to be in progress at a time? Multiply that by 2- one for each leg of the call on the meetme side, one for each leg of the call on the potential client’s side. As you can see, that’s a lot of calls for asterisk to handle, and your hardware requirements will be tremendous![/quote]
Today we released a modified version of app_conference that can be used as a drop-in replacement for meetme in VICIDIAL installations: sourceforge.net/project/shownote … p_id=95133
We have run this on a small production server and load was half that of using meetme on the same machine, and that was just using T1 channels only, the load reduction on servers using high-compression codecs is even more dramatic.
We certainly don’t recommend using this for large-scale production servers yet, but the performance is very promising so far.
We initially started playing around with it because we had all sorts of DTMF passthru problems with meetme, app_conference solves those as well, and it requires no zaptel timer or hardware like meetme does.
Sorry last time i came to this place I new nothing and asked lot of stupid questions. II have learned quite a bit of day and night coz I want to save money. Its no point paying huge dollars where it can be done in cost effective way. learned setting up Linux, Asterisk, (knew php,perl, mysql) I am still learning in detail.
I am trying to get 20 clone computers or refurbished ones at one shop. Does anyone ones where I can get it for really low price(if it really is can get 30 ). Can ship to fiji.
I am still confus which way to go VICIDIAL or GnuDial. Will calls really going to be good when using VICIDIAL. If the dialer detects the live call and while transfering to a active agent, the customer might hang the phone down. How long does it take for the dialer to send it the agent. Does it depend on what type of PC r we using or something else. Can the live call be answered by the agent and greeted and then send to active agent or its no a good idea?
As a cold call point of view which one is better.
Can the Asterisk server be in same server where we control the Pcs or its better to have separate. I think separate is effiecient.
[quote=“ssin14”]I am still confus which way to go VICIDIAL or GnuDial. Will calls really going to be good when using VICIDIAL. If the dialer detects the live call and while transfering to a active agent, the customer might hang the phone down. How long does it take for the dialer to send it the agent. Does it depend on what type of PC r we using or something else. Can the live call be answered by the agent and greeted and then send to active agent or its no a good idea?[/quote]You want vicidial over gnudial. It doesn’t take long to transfer to the agent, since the agent is already on the phone and the client is immediately bridged to them.
thanks for that I think I will go for VICIDial . Just checking with 20 seats I have to get a server hardware not the normal pcs P4 3.2 that will be a server machine. and for client machines p3 1Ghz 256 RAM 20GB fine. What would you recommend. I may be expanding gradually up to 50 seats this year. I am also low on capital so what would u recommend.
20 seats for outbound only. If the server specification is in budget then I might do inbound just for my business to give our firm good image.
. That’ll purr like a kitten!