
Rolling your own cloud phone system - timrogers
https://gocardless.com/blog/rolling-your-own-cloud-phone-system/
======
nlh
This is cool stuff -- also shows how far things have come in the past decade.

I'm running my company's phone system on a cloud-hosted Asterisk system --
it's basically the same thing that we've been using for years, and works quite
well, though we're still tied to physical desk phones.

Curious if anyone has good resources for working with an Asterisk core for an
app like this. I recall seeing a Rails framework for Asterisk out there
somewhere, but no clue if it's any good. Would love to hear thoughts...

~~~
timrogers
Indeed - Twilio is awesome purely because it allows you to integrate with the
phone networks, which are basically a legacy system, naturally within your
applications.

I've not really played with Asterisk. How is it to configure, and what has
your experience been like? We outsource the PBX side of our system to a SIP
provider called Voipfone ([http://voipfone.co.uk](http://voipfone.co.uk)) but
it would be appealing if we could do this in-house and have even more
flexibility.

~~~
jaytaylor
Asterisk is very cool and relatively easy to get started with. It's successor,
FreeSwitch [1], is also a beautiful piece of software!

[1] [http://www.freeswitch.org/](http://www.freeswitch.org/)

~~~
nlh
FreeSwitch isn't really a "successor" to Asterisk -- Asterisk is still very
much in active development (as is FreeSwitch - I think). More like a competing
(in a good way) project. See:

[http://www.freeswitch.org/node/117](http://www.freeswitch.org/node/117)

~~~
jaytaylor
Thank you for clarifying.

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timrogers
OP here. If you have any questions about building this kind of thing, feel
free to comment or drop me an email at tim [at] gocardless [dot] com.

~~~
josh2600
Hey Tim, big phone geek here.

I'm assuming this is a quasi-call center environment. Have you thought about
how you're going to implement manager eavesdrop and other things of that
nature? What you've done is cool, I'm curious about where you're planning to
go from here :).

~~~
timrogers
Hi Josh - I'm the same. Building solutions to these kinds of problems is
really interesting.

We've not implemented that yet, but I've spoken to another company doing
similar things with around 100 agents and they've managed to implement this
using Twilio's conferencing facility. It's easy to drop in and out of a
conference silently, which is perfect for this.

Our support is certainly not at scale, and lots more features will become
appropriate as we grow, from letting people schedule callbacks to manager
eavesdropping to more sophisticated management of waiting calls.

Have you built anything like this?

~~~
josh2600
Well,

I work at 2600hz, so we're building stuff like this but for big operators and
Fortune100 companies. I'm just curious about what tools you have at your
disposal when it comes to building complex applications. I'm a big fan of
Twilio because they've really lowered the barrier to entry in the market to
basically 0.

So, have I built anything like this: yes, but it's a little different.

I think Twilio's conferencing is the way to go but I'm not familiar enough
with their API to know how mute and deaf control states work. Those are pretty
essential to a good eavesdropper experience.

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7Figures2Commas
How has the call quality been?

~~~
timrogers
We've generally found it to be decent, although (naturally) variable. We use
Twilio alongside a UK SIP provider called Voipfone
([http://voipfone.co.uk](http://voipfone.co.uk)) which is how we actually get
our calls through to PSTN.

Twilio Client ([https://www.twilio.com/client](https://www.twilio.com/client))
seems to provide better quality, but we really like the convenience of
hardware phones and built-in PBX functionality.

~~~
erikcw
Interesting. I've always had much better quality using Twilio to bridge to
PSTN than through Twilio Client.

I keep coming back to Twilio Client because the idea of a softphone (and a web
based one at that) is so alluring compared to having to deploy more hardware.

If I recall there was also a cost advantage to using Twilio Client (you only
have to pay for one leg of the call instead of both legs).

But every time we've tried to deploy it there have been quality and usability
issues which have forced us to fallback to PSTN. Never the less, I'll keep
trying it every couple of months... :)

