[asterisk-biz] consultant questions : glad to pay for email reply

[Dave Walker]

On Wed, 2007-09-26 at 13:31 +0100, Miles Keaton wrote:
<SNIP>
> 
> QUESTIONS:
> 
> - Each work-at-home person should only need a headset + softphone
> software on their PC, right?   (Is the software audio quality as good
> as separate hardware SIP phones now, if run on a modern-speed PC?
> Recommendation for best?)

A softphone will only be good as the headset.   A good quality (ie,
plantronics) headset will be equally as good as a conventional SIP
handset.  The only things you need to worry about, is the potential need
for port forwarding. 

> - To have land-line (incoming) phone numbers in a country, should we
> have an Asterisk server in that country?  A rack-mount server in a
> telco/colo center, that receives the calls in on a Digium card then
> SIP-routes them out to the work-at-home SIP phones?   (I'm assuming it
> shouldn't be all-one-central server, since calls from Australia to
> Australia would actually be crossing the ocean twice, reducing call
> quality.)

If the call is being routed via SIP anyway - would it not seem logical
to look for a SIP provider in that country and route the entire call via
SIP.  One place you could consider getting a DDI is didx.net.

If you keep the entire solution SIP, then you should look at
round-trip-times between the * server and the outbound supplier.  If
this is short, then generally - once the call is on their network then
the geographical location shouldn't matter.  However, this is dependant
on a good SIP supplier :)

> - Can Asterisk report-back IAX-softphone availability, without needing
> to pass a call?   So our website can say how many agents are available
> (in which countries) to take their call now?

Yes, this can work with both SIP and IAX clients.  Will require some
ingenuity, and calling asterisk commands.  If the website receives many
hits, it might be better to output to txt file or a db of the status.
Then the PHP (or equiv) parses the file and shows who is available.
There are some examples of this method floating around on the net.

> - Is there a better way you'd recommend setting up phones for the
> "SITUATION" described, above?   Since there is no legacy phone number
> or contract, it could be 100% VoIP.
> 

It sounds like you are going about this the right way, ask to demo
providers services - If they won't allow it, then go elsewhere :)

Kind Regards,
Dave Walker
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