[calverson]

I am setting up an Asterisk box with vicidial for a company...

I have a few questions (if anybody has any info on this, help would be appreciated... I am a bit noobish on this front).

1. What is g729 and is it needed?

2. What is the best software to use as the softphone?

3. What sort of bandwidth requirements do having 10 people call simultaneously have?

4. How workable is it? (anyone with any experience... what system did you use? What speed internet connection?)

Any feedback will be appreciated.

Ta, Calvin

[Peter]

Is vicidial SIP?

[calverson]

Originally Posted by Peter 

Is vicidial SIP?

http://astguiclient.sourceforge.net/vicidial.html

Yes... but not per-se.

[mduell]

1. A codec, and yes you should buy it.
2. Xlite is popular.
3. I don't know.
4. My office uses Asterisk for about a dozen users/dozens of phones and it works well. We have about 40Mbps of internet bandwidth at the office.

[mflorell]

Originally Posted by calverson 

1. What is g729 and is it needed?

g729 is a high-compression audio codec, it is not required, but you will get more calls through on a smaller bandwidth pipe than using G711 Ulaw or Alaw. There is a Paid version and a free version for Asterisk depending on what country the system is in.

2. What is the best software to use as the softphone?

We like Zoiper, it does IAX and SIP. http://www.zoiper.com

3. What sort of bandwidth requirements do having 10 people call simultaneously have?

What will be the lines-to-agent ratio? How many calls do you want to handle concurrently?

4. How workable is it? (anyone with any experience... what system did you use? What speed internet connection?)

It's extremely workable, I am biased because I wrote VICIDIAL, It is in use at over 700 companies in over 70 countries around the world, from hundreds of call center seats to much smaller setups.

We also have a very active VICIDIAL forum community at:
http://www.eflo.net/VICIDIALforum

Hope that helps,

MATT---

[calverson]

Originally Posted by mflorell 

g729 is a high-compression audio codec, it is not required, but you will get more calls through on a smaller bandwidth pipe than using G711 Ulaw or Alaw. There is a Paid version and a free version for Asterisk depending on what country the system is in.

South Africa - where could I find a list of what is required where?

Originally Posted by mflorell 

We like Zoiper, it does IAX and SIP. http://www.zoiper.com

Cool - I will download it and check it out. Was using X-Light, but the free version doesn't support g729

Originally Posted by mflorell 

What will be the lines-to-agent ratio? How many calls do you want to handle concurrently?

4 Lines per agent

Originally Posted by mflorell 

It's extremely workable, I am biased because I wrote VICIDIAL, It is in use at over 700 companies in over 70 countries around the world, from hundreds of call center seats to much smaller setups.

Yesterday I got vicidial to accept a list (that I made) and made 5 calls in a row to people in my office, without me dialing a number.

I must be a nerd because I found this exciting, but the people I called didn't seem to have the same viewpoint!

Originally Posted by mflorell 

We also have a very active VICIDIAL forum community at:
http://www.eflo.net/VICIDIALforum

Hope that helps,

MATT---

I have another question - vici can't accept lists that I created in Smultron in OSX - had to be something created in Windows. What encoding should it use? I am the admin of the system and am going to be uploading the lists etc. and I would like to be able to use my computer to do so - which is a Mac...

Also, when vici gets leads from a list, is there some sort of comment syntax?

Sorry, I am a web designer that has been thrown into the deep end in a pool named Asterisk and Vici!

Thanks Matt.

Cheers,

Calvin

[calverson]

mflorell

that is not Matt Florell?

You wrote the Vicidial Manager Manual?

Nice! Good to see you on a Mac forum (or... somewhat!)

[mflorell]

I'm not sure as to the specific countries that need to use the official license, but since I have received a couple of questions about this in the past I have sent in a request to Sipro(the licensor) for a country list. If licensing is required it is at most $10 per channel.

For 40 concurrent channels(10 agents x 4 lines per agent) if you are using G729 you could probably use as small as a 1Mb up/down internet connection if the quality of the connection is good and you are only using it for voice. If you use ULAW/ALAW G711 then you would need at least 3.5Mb up/down.

It is cool when you get it working the first time, and yes you are a nerd, as am I

VICIDIAL can accept lists made by several applications, but they have to use a valid file extension like are used in Windows environments. So, Comma Separated Values lead files need to use the .csv file extension. Tab or Pipe delimited files need to use .txt, and MS Excel format files need to use the .xls extension. Using extensions I have created lead files in 'vi' on Linux before, so Smultron-created files should work as well.

Not sure about your comments format question, could you be more specific?

I did web development/design many many years ago, I know where you're coming from

Yes, that's me. I am the author of the VICIDIAL Manuals, as well as the creator of VICIDIAL. I am nowhere near as much of a mac-head as I was about 7 years ago when I spent most of my time(even development time) in front of a Mac screen. Most of my work these days is in Linux, but all of my development is aimed at cross-OS compatibility so things will work everywhere.

[calverson]

Originally Posted by mflorell 

Not sure about your comments format question, could you be more specific?

As in HTML:

<!-- comment -->

Something that VICI would just ignore. Useful to add notes to lists and that when they go through a few people, which they might.

Originally Posted by mflorell 

Yes, that's me. I am the author of the VICIDIAL Manuals, as well as the creator of VICIDIAL. I am nowhere near as much of a mac-head as I was about 7 years ago when I spent most of my time(even development time) in front of a Mac screen. Most of my work these days is in Linux, but all of my development is aimed at cross-OS compatibility so things will work everywhere.

Hehe, cool, so I am speaking to the right person. I have Hardy loaded up on the Bootcamp Partition of my MBP and use it about 80% of the time.

So, with the elegance of the Mac design and the power/simplicity/coolness of Ubuntu I am quite happy.

[mflorell]

There is no "official" comment format, but if the phone number field has less than 5 digits in it the line will be kicked out, so if you have no delimiters in a line it is essentially ignored.

[calverson]

Thanks. I might be bugging you again the the near future, but for now, I should be fine.

[mflorell]

Good luck, let me know how it goes.

[calverson]

There is something else that I forgot to mention...

How you tell Asterisk to talk to your softphone using uLaw, but to then use g729 when transmitting to the service provider? Is this possible?

[Mithras]

I was going to tell the OP that he'd have better luck somewhere else, like a VOIP forum, and then the damn author of the software has to show up.

[mflorell]

Originally Posted by calverson 

There is something else that I forgot to mention...
How you tell Asterisk to talk to your softphone using uLaw, but to then use g729 when transmitting to the service provider? Is this possible?

Yes you can do this, you would use the entries in the sip.conf and/or iax.conf files for the phones and carrier account to specify this.

The lines you need to add are these inside of each account entry:

Only ULAW-
disallow=all
allow=ulaw

Only G729-
disallow=all
allow=g729

[calverson]

So my sip.conf would look something like this:

[general]
bindport=5060
bindaddr=0.0.0.0
srvlookup=no
dtmfmode=rfc2833
disallow=all
allow=g729
;sipdebug=yes

#include sip_providers.conf

;#######################################
;phone templates
;#######################################

[basic_phone](!)
type=friend
host=dynamic
context=default
secret=1234

;template for soft phones
[soft_phone](!,basic_phone)
allow=all

[32001](soft_phone)
disallow=all
allow=g729
Only ULAW-
disallow=all
allow=ulaw
Only G729-
disallow=all
allow=g729

[32002](soft_phone)
disallow=all
allow=g729
Only ULAW-
disallow=all
allow=ulaw
Only G729-
disallow=all
allow=g729

[mflorell]

Not exactly,

replace this:

disallow=all
allow=g729
Only ULAW-
disallow=all
allow=ulaw
Only G729-
disallow=all
allow=g729

with this ONLY:

disallow=all
allow=g729


You of course will also need the secret and other essential elements. Since you have downloaded the astGUIclient/VICIDIAL package you can go in the /docs/conf_examples filder and take a look at the example sip.conf and iax.conf files for more info.