Please advise on IVR solutions

i am designing a radio program to raise awareness about afghan parliamentary election of 2010. the project will use computer telephony integrated systems to produce interactive voice and messaging to maximize interaction and two way flows of information, to engage the general public but also targeted to specific groups and critical sectors of the Afghan public. i was wondering if anyone could advice on technical details and how to go about doing this project.

i would like to use Interactive Voice Response menus for audiences to call the local radio stations. In addition to the participatory IVR based radio programme, we want to operate a texting (USSD and SMSs) information source; this is a two tier operation. The first tier is national that send texts to a critical sector such as journalists, activists, managers and etc. the second tier is produced and managed by local radio station that is linked to updates alert system by cellphone to up to 1,0000 target participants, who joined a predetermined list based on their preferences of information.

We are looking for an IVR system that is connected to the telephony network. We would like to know if i could find a VoIP supplier that terminates normal PSTN calls (from mobile phones) and then converts them to SIP VoIP in afghanistan. I was also wondering if we need a SIP gateway to terminate calls, such as a cisco product although we’ll have internet. We would like to have a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Gateway Service that offers a single platform for transporting Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) between IP networks and the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). This way we can send USSD and SMSs to our predetermined list and receive voice calls in our radio stations.

There are four major GSM networks in Afghanistan and my question is can we accept phone call from all and convert traffic signals to SIP.

We would like to embed the use of interactive programs using cellphone in local radio stations and that means we would like to own our locally hosted system built so we add channels for the maximum simultaneous callers expected. How much would the server preferably windows would cost and would be great to get the price on the IVR platform and costs of adding channels for simultaneous calls.

Not much is certain at this point when it comes to figures and numbers but what I am telling you is the most probable, it will all depend on the funding we will receive.