Qindel Group

This is one of this Telco proposition that Qindel offers to their customers. A lot of people use Asterisk as a PBX, and it does its job quite well. In fact, there is a lot of competition in this area, other players have taken the Open Source Asterisk and have put some nice graphical interfaces around them such as Trixbox or Switchbox. Here comes another proposition using Asterisk as a Ringback Tones solution.

So what is a Ringback Tone solution? It is that music that you hear when you dial someone on your mobile phone. Obviously this tone can depend on who is calling and of group of callers.

Well asterisk has that play tones functionality, and deciding what tone to play depending on the callerId is simply a database lookup.

So how has Qindel implemented this:
- Using Asterisk as the IVR (this could be connected via SS7, QSIG, SIP, H.323, …)
- Using as the backend an LDAP database. The LDAP databases have natively support for replication, and are optimized for reads, with penalization on writes, although Asterisk supports LDAP from 1.6, there is a patch from 1.4 onwards and we currently use the lookup inside the AGI script.
- Using an AGI script to do the database lookup (Do you know the Net::Server and the Asterisk::FastAGI perl modules?)

The challenge in all the real operators is then the provisioning and the monitoring. Provisioning, is really operator dependent and I won’t get into it today (this is a discussion for another day), but monitoring can be easily achieved with Nagios and Cacti (another one which should have its own discussion, in particular with Qindel’s CMDB), and the native support of Asterisk for SNMP (from version 1.4.x)

I hope you enjoyed this entry.