In comparison to standard call centre installations, fixed and wireless telephone service providers may gain more functionality out of their systems by integrating call centre components with network infrastructure. This opens the door to a wide range of applications such as call centre service offerings, integrated conferencing solutions, voice over internet integration, home agents, improved routing and reuse of existing infrastructure. During our projects we had to realize, that most public network components do not provide the flexibility required for call centre integration. A major bottleneck is typically the call control interface of the public network component.

This is, where our partner Telesoft Technologies joins in. Telesoft Technologies provides a wide range of products with focus on fixed and wireless service providers covering applications such as fixed line SMS, SMS firewalls, SS7 filtering, IN and CAMEL gateways, roaming gateways, surveillance & monitoring as well as diagnostics & testing. Telesoft Technologies also offers a programmable switching platform called OKEFORD®, which has been proven very useful in call center installations since the ninetees. In the early days, its signaling components were used as a protocol converter between SS7 and ISDN for AT&T call centre solutions (now being part of the AVAYA product portfolio). The latest generation OKEFORD® provides a great deal more than just protocol conversion within the call centre environment, providing advanced IN call routing, call completion, IVR functionality and much more!

The Okeford Switching Solution comes in three flavours:

Up to 8 E1 / T1 ports
Up to 8 ISDN links
Up to 8 SS7 link sets each with up to 8 signalling links
Up to 248 terminated calls
Optional Media on up to 248 circuits (DTMF receive / transmit, voice prompt / play)
1U chassis

Up to 56 E1 / T1 ports
Up to 56 ISDN links
Up to 8 SS7 link sets each with up to 8 signalling links
Up to 1736 terminated calls
Up to 1 STM-1 Optical ports providing 2 x 63 E1 equivalent streams
Up to 4 DS-3 ports providing 4 x 28 T1 or 4 x 21 E1 equivalent streams
Up to 2 DS-3 ports with robbed bit signalling providing 2 x 28 T1 equivalent or 2 x 21 E1 equivalent streams
Optional Media on up to 1736 circuits (DTMF receive / transmit, voice prompt / play)
9U chassis

3.OKEFORD® 4000 with

Up to 128 E1 / T1 ports
Up to 128 ISDN links
Up to 8 SS7 link sets each with up to 8 signalling links
Up to 3967 terminated calls
Carrier grade dual-plane high-availability solution
Hot-swap cPCI line card architecture
Optional Media on up to 3967 circuits (DTMF receive / transmit, voice prompt / play)
15U including chassis, routers and servers

All versions, ranging from OKEFORD® 2000 to OKEFORD® 4000 provide the following features:

• Non-blocking switching architecture with up to 400.000 BHCA
• Open programmable switch with developers XML API (INAP over XML)
• Interfaces for E1, T1 (T1/E1 and SS7/ISDN may be mixed on a single card), STM-1, OC-3 and DS3 (not for OKEFORD® 2000) and IP
• Protocol support for SS7, IN, GSM, ISDN, SDH and SONET (A complete protocol listing may be found here)
• GMSC and VNM interfaces and APIs
• Programmable progress tones
• Configurable trigger, routing and hunting table
• User-friendly GUI interfaces for management and provisioning
• Real-time remote access, configuration and management
• Call Detail Record (CDR) ínterfaces (filebased and via TCP/IP)
• SNMP based alarming interface
• Integrated SMS (GSM, CDMA) and USSD (GSM)
• Optional conferencing support
• Optional media support (DTMF receive / transmit, voice prompt / play)