vicidial.org

A recent issue has come up that we can't seem to put a finger on. Has anyone run into this or have an idea on where to troubleshoot? Any input is appreciated!

In Autodial mode Agents are sporadically hearing ringing - a different ringing than the distinctive Vicidial System Ring, so I am thinking it may be a signaling/options issue. This is happening on 2 separate systems, we have 7 different carriers that the trunk LCRs into and the behavior does not seem limited to one carrier, yet I can't see any pattern here.


Dialplan:

exten => _91NXXNXXXXXX,1,AGI(agi://127.0.0.1:4577/call_log)
exten => _91NXXNXXXXXX,2,Dial(${Carrier}/${EXTEN:1},,tTo)
exten => _91NXXNXXXXXX,3,Hangup

Account Entry:

[Carrier]
username=
type=peer
port=5060
secret=
host=xx.xxx.com
fromuser=
context=trunkinbound
disallow=all
allow=g729
canreinvite=yes
qualify=yes

I have PCAPs available if needed...


Thank you in advance for any help...

We had this just the other day...ended up being the carrier.

I have this happening with all 7 of my carriers all of a sudden...a week ago this wasn't happening. we have made no changes on our end, and again it is happening on 2 separate systems.

Any ideas on something to check into? Anyone?

What changed? Firewall internet service VPN? Load on MySQL? New reports written or something else running?

Nothing has changed on our side that I am aware of. Any ideas on where to look for something off?

MIght be carrier related due to the LCR that most of them are doing. When doing outbound auto or predictive dialing, the only way for the ringing to be heard (immediately before customer answers the phone) is if the trunk is analog (PSTN). So somewhere along the carriers' LCR path, analog lines are being used.

Recently many carriers are "ripping off" the call centers by pre-answering the calls and then playing a ring tone. They begin billing when the answer occurs, even though in most cases the call hasn't even arrived at the final telco yet.

Solution: Find a new carrier. And remember, when you're looking for the low-price-leader, he, too, is looking for the low-price LCR in his lineup and will likely end up with at least one upline carrier who keeps prices low by ripoff.

Or: Create a new system status called "RING", collect them. Report it, demand a refund for all those fake answers, and demand that the carrier prune his upline to remove whomever caused the offense. You'll be doing him a favor.

And begin scouting a carrier who is aware of false answers and is "dealing" with it or is high enough on the food chain to avoid the low-lifes who do this.

I have dramatically reduced the amount of calls with the Ringing Behavior, which was FAS "False Answer Supervision: http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Fake ... ision+(FAS)+service that EVERYONE of my carriers was sending me...it was a complete nightmare to detect as the calls were receiving 200 OK SIP Responses...AND this was very sporadic. We did set up a dispo status that the agents can hit when experiencing it, which reduced the time to report it to us and made it a lot easier to pull from reports (Thanks Bill Connelly!)

I have spent the last 2 weeks pulling call examples and working with the support engineers on this and have it down by about 90% of what it was...I am wroking on the rest of them, and am not sure if there are still downstream carriers that my carriers are using that we haven't identified yet or ??? - I suspect with the improvement that we have seen thus far it is just continuing to hammer our carriers to get them to pull the carriers from our routes...

This has been by far the trickiest problem I have yet to have to troubleshoot in 3.5 years...

What also surprised me is that there wasn't a lot of people posting on this...I know we couldn't be the only ones affected...

Hello,
Thank your for share that info here.
Can you please tell me what carrier are you using at this moment?
I have 5 different carriers and having the same issue with all of them.

A ringback AND (this is important) billing is 99.9% of the time is FAS. You should not get a 200OK and hear ringing 99.9% of the time. There are some rare instances where the ringback happens after 200OK and that is just how the called party set up their system. I have come across a few numbers like this which ended up not being FAS.

Another instance is when a carrier plays a fake ringback during PDD so that the dialer/agent does not just time out the call due to dead air. Keep in mind, there is no billing happening yet. You can tell this when you hear 2 different ringback tones sometimes. But eventually the call should be picked up by someone.

So you really have to check and see if your carrier billed you for the calls with the ringing. If they did then its FAS and should be reported to your carrier.

How do all of your carriers are all of the sudden suffering from the same issue? Well there are few ways this can happen:
1) All 7 carriers are somehow bottled necked to the 1 or 2 carris who have the issue.
2) Carrier industry folks all know each other for the most part and buy and sell from each other. Also, resellers funnel "great" deal routes to all of their carrier customers which could be having an issue.
3) Your campaign changed and you are calling higher cost areas which are prone to FAS.

FAS is everywhere and everyone experiences FAS from time to time. Sometimes it's deliberate other times it's a technical issue. If they tell you they don't have any FAS on their network, they are lying. If your carrier is not willing to investigate and resolve the issue it's a red flag and time to leave. And yes, there are a lot of carriers out there who will just blame it back on the customer. Also a lot of carrier support people who either don't want or care to investigate the problem.

My Experience - over 10 years in wholesale carrier biz and currently operate a Telecom company.