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KSI SE7EN 7 FIRST VOIP MEDIA BLOG

VoIP Softswitches - A Boon for Telecom Industry!

VoIP Softswitch is finding popularity in the telco sphere fast not only because of its advanced feature set, lower cost of ownership and management but also because of the strengthening of the VoIP itself to provided sustained carrier grade QoS. The softswitch has therefore started to replace traditional switches based on hardware. vSwitch is a classic hosted softswitch service based on the Genband/Nextone platform. To know more about this amazing service please read on.

VoIP Softswitches have indeed reduced financial and management burden on companies aspiring to offer telecom services. Functions like signaling, call services, call routing and others are all handled by a softswitch instead of a hardware based system. Furthermore, softswitch manages and controls different Media Gateways over a TCP/IP link. Now what is a Media Gateway? A Media Gateway enables connectivity of different media streams to create an end to end data or voice call. Some media gateways have interfaces to connect with different networks including PSTN, E1, STM, etc. and some that they may not have.

Talking about the vSwitch, it has a characteristic value and ability to handle carrier services for long distance and wholesale VoIP businesses. It facilitates in making end to end calls over H.323 or SIP from one operator to another while maintaining and monitoring call quality QoS. Such Class 4 switch functionality is mostly used for this connectivity over long distance calls. On the contrary Class 5 switches as used at telephone exchanges are used for directly connecting with the end user.

vSwitch is a next generation softswitch that can manage multiple communication streams including fax, voice, data and video traffic. Now vSwitch also has features such as priority based, cost based, lossless based routing that are an enormous benefit to carriers world over.

vSwitch offers all the switching functionality on a hosted voip softswitch. This is considered as a great alternative option to having a Telecom switching infrastructure and to keep a softswitch at the premises of the carrier. In the case of a hosted Softswitches, partitions are created on the softswitch where each represents the workspace of a wholesale voice operator and is an exact replica of the original softswitch. The partition owner can have access to the data, signaling IP, CDRs and other details of interconnecting endpoints for his partition. Such a system is easy to setup and manage and can run in few minutes, this all results in great savings and high efficiency in resource utilization.

The General features of Hosted VoIP Softswitch are:

• Real Time Traffic Control and Re- routing

• Application as Service

• Full customer support

• Billing and monitoring by customers

• Handling over 500 concurrent calls per each account

• Service setup takes just few hours

• Full support of H.323 and SIP

Routing Features of Hosted VoIP Softswitch are:

• ANI Routing

• Online call debugging

• Least cost Routing

• False answer supervision predictive Filter

• Setting priorities and weights

• Ms Excel upload and download

Reporting and Alerting Features are:

• Active calls

• CDRs download

• Profit/Margin report

• Real - Time billing

• Real - Time ASR, ACD and Traffic Graphs

Billing and Accounting Features are:

• Automatic Invoices to customers

• Settings customer credit limits

• Prepaid and postpaid customer management

• Real Time balance update

• Balance dependent Routing

• ASR/ACD Dependent Routing

Encompassing these above features vSwitch or a Hosted VoIP softswitch provides advanced switching platform as a service and solution for billing management. The service covers Nextone/Genband switch access which the market standard in wholesale voice is switching. With the Hosted VoIP Softswitch, service providers benefit from improved call completion rates, higher revenues, less revenue leakage and improved network security and availability.

About the Author

This above article has been written by an expert working for vSwitch, a leading company that deals in VoIP Switching & Billing Solutions.

Salary Expectations?

Hi,
I am due to enter negotiations regarding my salary.

I have around 8 years experience in IT from a career point of view, and have trained towards an MCSA (waiting for exams).

I am looking after 14 servers in 3 locations. We are opening another office down south which I will be expected to support

The servers include 4 DC'c, 2 Exchange servers, 1 SQL Server, File Servers, FTP Servers; as well as the company phone system, copiers, software licencing and 3 netscreens and 1 WiFi bridge and to support approx 45 staff

I am also expected to source new technology like media players, etc for the work the company actually does.

We are increasing the servers to around 20 in the next fews months as well implementing company wide VoIP technology and better WAN comms.

What I need to know is should I be asking for more than the £25,000 plus car I am currently on?

My TItle is IT Manager and I am in the East Midlands area

Cheers

I assume this is a job move - in which case you should always look to improve your financial situation, otherwise what's the point. I'd ask for slightly more, explaining that you'll only move jobs if there's a rise in it for you. Maybe £28,500, settle on £27k?

Personally, that's already double what I'm on, and I work my socks off. Makes me sick it does