Softphone information

[glenn b]

Hi all,

I'm on a project where there is need on voip communication between one office and a few workers.

The main target is that the office people can communicate with the workers and in the other way BUT the workers cannot communicate with other workers.

The office people have already IP phones but for the workers that only have tin clients we are thinking to implement softphones on there clients.

So a few questions about this:

1) Is it possible to manage the communication between those workers/workers and office/workers?

2) We already have a voip system, callmanager and IP phones. I guess the implementation with the softphones is not so hard and doesn't need e clean install of the voip system (callmanager).

3) Within 2 years we will implement video conference is there an option for this on the softphone so we can see the workers when calling? (optional)

I'm still reading the information, but an opinion of someone with more experience would be nice.

Kind Regards.

[Jaime Valencia]

You can configure CIPCs and just make sure to configure the CSS/partitions to restrict calling between workers.

HTH

java

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[glenn b]

Thanks for the information.

Read the manual, and some information about partitions and CSS and I completed my setup as I wanted.

The only issue I got is that some cisco users (with real IP phone) call the CIPC and the CIPC user doesn't hear the other user using a fixed device. But the user from the fixed device hears the CIPC user. Strange enough it is only with a few users.  I'm debugging now.

Kind Regards.

[barry]

Other thing to remember is how audio / video flows on a Cisco telephony environment.

Signally flows from handset to CallManager.

Audio / video flow directly between handsets.

Therefore if your remote workers are for example over VPN, they need to be able to directly talk to each other for a call to work. I've seen many examples where remote access VPNs don't allow "spokes" to talk to each other, and therefore remote to remote calling doesn't work. The phone rings (unless you've restricted this with CSS/partition) but you don't get audio.

As an aside, one way audio is almost always a broken RTP stream in one direction. If its VPN, ensure CIPC is binding to the right IP address (which is generally the IP address assigned to the virtual VPN adapter).

Barry

[glenn b]

Barry,

Thanks for this information. Didn't know how tha audio flow works.

Well the voice system is local, so we don't use VPN for this application( communication between WH office and warehouse workers).

I could say, it could be a firewall problem, but I set the audio ports open. Even the restrictions in the callmanager are set correct.

I folow you that there will be a rtp stream that is broken by something, gone do some test with more phones and locate the problem.

Are there any debugging tools to track problems with IP phonce or with the whole voip system?

Again thanks for the information.

Kind Regards

[barry]

Hi Glenn

Glad the information was useful.

Audio going from handset to handset is one of CallManager's great strengths and weaknesses. Good: the number of handsets even a small CM server can support is pretty large. Bad: diagnosing audio issues can be difficult as you need to trace traffic inside the network - tracing at the CallManager end doesn't help.

In terms of CIPC, the way I use is to install Wireshark on the PC, place a call, and see what I can see in the RTP streams. Wireshark can decode / replay RTP now so you can generally work out what is going on.

You can also use the same trick for a wired phone. There is a CallManager option for each device that tells it to copy all of its traffic out to the PC port. So it you run Wireshark on a PC attached to the phone you can trap both ends of the connection. That way you can almost always work out what is going on.

Hope this helps.

Barry

[glenn b]

Hi Barry,

Thanks for the tip about Wireshark.

In the mean time I have reached a better point of view on the problem. I would say that the problem only consist when we call from a wifi phone and NOT in case if we call from a fixed IP phone. Their is certainly a problem with the wifi connections so i guess the problem is not on the side of the softphone.

Thanks for al the advice, helped a lot!!!

Kind Regards