Many UK based organisations are now using overseas call centres to reduce their operating costs. We recently designed and built a Cisco based voice over IP solution for an international pharmaceutical company. The brief was as follows.

• Agents in India needed to be able to call customers in the UK
• Incoming calls from UK customers could be routed to India based on load or time of day
• Extension to extension dialling between the India and UK offices
• The system needed to support 60 concurrent calls
• Voice quality needed to be good with low delay

Our design involved Cisco 3700 series routers fitted with voice processing cards. By putting the voice processing functions in the network this made the PABX requirements very simple. In fact the client simply had to install extra ISDN30 cards (with support for QSIG) in each PABX. At the UK end we upgraded their Toshiba CTX system and an agent sorted the India PABX upgrade.

Communications between India and the UK can be expensive, so the client decided to trial the solution using the

Internet with the installation of private leased line to follow. This presented us with some technical challenges because the Internet does not provide guaranteed performance or latency. We were involved in careful selection of ISPs, including testing the end to end delay (very important in the voice world). By careful management of bandwidth it is possible to effectively use the Internet to support international voice calls.

The ability to pass free voice calls between offices using existing Internet access circuits is very attractive to many organisations. Progressive Networks have designed and implemented various voice solutions.

For the solution highlighted above we used a private leased circuit for the international leg of the call and this ensured that calls were placed at local UK rates, often using an alternate supplier to obtain even cheaper national calls within the UK. If the leased line failed then the Internet was used as a backup. We are well versed in the technologies used to support VOIP including Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms that manage congestion, delay, queuing etc.