On my travails through the blogosphere, I occasionally encounter some open-minded enterprise technologist who just has questions about Voice over IP. It turns out that on this occasion, Duckdown blog asks some great ones. Here are the questions, and my answers:
Who currently has the largest VoIP driven call center where VoIP is used to the phone itself (not just trunking)?
This is a fantastic question. One of the biggest call centers in the business equipment manufacturing industry is run on an end-to-end VoIP solution: yup, Cisco Systems. In fact, their entire enterprise network has a VoIP VLAN that had, according to a Cisco director I spoke with early last year, some 15,000 voice endpoints. There are very few call centers that would ever need to be that large, let alone private enterprise voice networks. Cisco certainly ranks as one the 500 largest private voice networks globally, I would think.
Another thought. I understand the airline JetBlue has a largely remote, VoIP-based distributed call-center with a majority of call center operators working from home. This is worthy of further investigation, too.
What open source VoIP software currently exists that is capable of recording the streams of say 200 concurrent calls in a call center scenario?
Asterisk certainly is, given enough processing power, RAM, and a fast enough hard disk array. I would think that the SipX stack would have less scalability, although I couldn’t tell you how to do it with SipX. I only know how to build central call-recording applications in Asterisk.
Does anyone know of any open source codecs that can read otherwise proprietary call-center recording software streams?
I’m not sure what you mean here. A codec is an algorithm for compressing and decompressing sound information. It’s either open source or it’s proprietary, but it can’t be both. So I think the answer is, no–there are none.
I would be interested in setting up a free service similar to freeconference.com to establish a VoIP based conference calling service and would like to know if there is any open source software that supports this?
You could do this using Yate, Asterisk, SipX, or even Vocal. If I were going to do it, I would do it with Asterisk almost certainly.
Many traditional carriers are bringing VoIP presence directly to large enterprises but have no ability to route this VoIP traffic over the same data lines that are multihomed to other carrier data networks. Curious if anyone at Skype has thought about bringing their service out of the consumer space and using it to solve business problems?
I know they’re thinking of this. That’s why they introduced Skype Groups, which allows centralized billing, payment, and account management for groups of SkypeIN and SkypeOUT phone numbers. That’s also why they recently introduced Skype-aware routers (thanks Netgear) which can act as secure supernodes without introducing security risks on desktop PCs within the enterprise. Finally, on the matter of trunking, what it’s going to take is for eBay to invest heavily in a circuit/network provider, perhaps a struggling one–hey how about Level3 or even Covad–in order for Skype business trunks to become a reality. AT&T or some other blue chip in the ILEC business would be slitting their throats if they partnered with Skype in such a manner.