Hi,
I am sure the general questions about running prepaid IVR platform with billing etc has been asked several times in this forum, however i like to ask whether a certain method of running this IVR is possible or not!
The aim is to use any analog VoIP gateway on H323/SIP that can read FSK signalling and detect Caller ID on ring to setup a call over voip (with the detected caller id) to an IVR platform which then can handle the prepaid procedures.
This presumably need a asterisk server acting as the IVR platform and doing the following:
- The call is coming from the gateway over VoIP and is answered by asterisk
- The call may or may not have a caller ID present, incoming protocol is preferrably H323.
- Once the call is answered, a TCL like VoIP application is then activated doing the normal prepaid IVRs eg, “Welcome to XXX, Enter your Pin Code”…
- The PIN/ANI is authenticated with freeradius or any authentication method asterisk has available for such prepaid system
- The user is asked to enter a destination number. Once the destination is entered, asterisk then will attempt to make the call to a certain IP address (International VoIP Carrier) to route the call.
so in effect the following will be prefered:
[user]–>[pstn]–>[quintum/audiocodes gateway]–>voip–>[asterisk]–>[route destination to international carrier]
I know quintum already provides such IVR prepaid functions, but we like to add further IVR functions to our prepaid platform (eg voucher recharge etc) that is not supported by quintum but is most likely possible on Asterisk…
As an alternative i could use a channel bank to do this on cisco with a customized TCL, but it is hard to find a reasonably priced channel bank that can detect FSK caller ID (which is important for my ANI authentication)
If it is possible to do the above, its biggest disadvantage would be the fact that the user’s voice quality will go through a double voip encoding,
from quintum to asterisk and from asterisk to destination number. But if we use a toll quality codec on the quintum–>asterisk side (as they reside on the same lan presumably) then that could also be less of a concern.
Your taughts on this are very much appreciated…
Regards
Hamed Nik