HostedSwitch®:Getting Started

From HostedSwitch®

The article contains the shortest route to test our service. For more information on available features, please read this article.

Contents 1 Equipment 1.1 Adding H.323 Gateway 1.1.1 Video Tutorial 1.2 Adding SIP Gateway 1.2.1 Video Tutorial 2 Routing 2.1 Creating New Routes 2.1.1 Video Tutorial 2.2 Managing routes 2.2.1 Searching Routes 2.2.2 Downloading Routes 2.2.3 Editing Routes 2.2.4 Other Tips 2.3 Uploading Routes (Rates) 3 Equipment Setup 4 Test Calls 4.1 Video Tutorial 5 CDRs (Reports) 5.1 Report Types 6 Account Activation 6.1 Signing Agreement 6.2 Making First Payment

Equipment

The first step in testing HostedSwitch® solution is adding VoIP gateways. Please note that in order to complete this roadmap you will need to add at least one originating and one terminating gateway.

Adding H.323 Gateway

• On Equipment page click "Add Equipment: H.323"

• Fill in the mandatory fields:
  • Description
  • Customer
  • IP Address (or range of IP addresses)
  • # of Voice Ports for Termination

Click here to learn more about the Equipment parameters.

Video Tutorial

The owners of the equipment (you or your customers) should configure the equipment to call/ receive calls to/from your dedicated SSw IP address. See the Technology page for recommended firewall policy details.

Note: All testing accounts have 216.206.188.216 IP address. You can check your dedicated IP address in the Information box.

Adding SIP Gateway

• Click "Add Equipment:SIP" on Equipment page
• Fill in the mandatory fields:
  • Description
  • Customer
  • IP address / Domain (leave 0.0.0.0 if it is an originating gateway and you use "Username + Password" Authentication)
  • Authentication
  • My Equipment Sends: Username / Password (both username and password are generated automatically, but username is editable)
  • # of Voice Ports for Termination

Note: fill in "My Equipment Receives: Username / Password" (highlighted in red) if it is a terminating gateway and your carrier requires Username/Password authentication.

Note: your customers should configure their SIP equipment to send calls to your dedicated IP address, port is 5060.

Video Tutorial

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Routing

Route includes the following parameters:

Originating Gateway – one or more

Terminating Gateway – one or more (in case of several terminating gateways system attempts to distribute incoming traffic evenly among them).

Region Name – all calls coming from originating gateway reach terminating gateway only if the called party number belongs to specified region (see “Area Codes” page for region code details).

Originator’s and Terminator’s billing settings – tariff and Grace Period/Min Duration/Billing Increment

Number of voice ports for the route – can be specified in E1/T1 or in ports directly

Codec – information field

Priority and Weight – routing management parameters

As soon as you have all necessary equipment registered you can proceed to routing.

• Open Routing page:

Creating New Routes

In order to create a new route:

• Step 1 - Fill out either a “Region Code” or a “Region name” field (see an example below)

Note: If you leave “Region Code” and “Region Name” empty, as the next step the system will load full A-Z list of Regions (Destinations), including mobile and proper sub-regions for each country, and you will be able to select the regions you need (see the picture below).

• Step 2 - Click “Establish Routes” (you should see the following page as a result)

• Step 3 - Specify originating and terminating gateways (customers)

Use “<” and “>” buttons to move certain customer or gateway to/from the list of originating or terminating gateways for the current route.

“<<” and “>>” buttons move all available gateways at once.

• Step 4 - Specify Region Names (Destinations)

Select the region from the corresponding drop-down list (you can view the codes associated with the region by clicking “Check codes” link).

• Step 5 - Set Prices and Billing Settings

Specify originating and terminating tariffs and billing settings. Specify port capacity of the route. Priority and weight are used for more efficient routing, e.g. distributing traffic among the routes with same destination and same originating gateways.

• Click "Submit" and "Confirm":

• Your route will appear on the Routing page:

Video Tutorial

Below you will find a short video tutorial on how to create a route:

Managing routes

Searching Routes

You can use a number of filters to narrow down the search among the existing routes

• Region Code (only routes with area codes matching this Region Code will appear)
• Region Name (only routes containing this Region Name as a part of their names will be shown)
• Reference ID (route with the entered Reference ID will be displayed)
• Originator (routes with this Originator, customer or equipment, will appear)
• Terminator (routes with this Terminator, customer or equipment, will be displayed)
• Route Status - checkboxes (only routes with the following statuses will be shown

  Active Only

  RTP routes Only

  Codec Conversion

  Day-Time routes Only

Downloading Routes

“Download” button allows you to download .xls list of your routes to your computer.

Note: only the routes matching your criteria (filters) will be downloaded.

Editing Routes

• On-Page Editing

You can edit all the parameters in drop-down lists or edit boxes right on the Routing page

Note: you should click “Submit” and then “Confirm” for your changes to take effect.

• Full-fledged Editing

To change route's gateways and customers tick the checkbox to the left of the route you want to edit and click "Edit", then follow the instructions from the Step 3 of "Creating New Routes" article.

Other Tips

• If you hold your mouse pointer on “Originating Customer” or “Terminating Customers” fields, you will see a popup with the list of all gateways added to this route.

• “RTP Proxy” checkbox allows you to turn on/off RTP (voice) traffic proxy. Normally, only signaling part of VoIP traffic goes through our Softswitch while RTP traffic is transferred from gateway to gateway bypassing our switch. With RTP proxy enabled the switch will also proxy the media part of the call. This feature can be used to conceal IP addresses of actual gateways what might be helpful to prevent one of your customers from acquiring any information on another. Use “RTP Routes Only” to search for routes with enabled RTP Proxy feature.

Note: RTP proxy is charged separately, see our Service Agreement for details.

Uploading Routes (Rates)

To Import or Upload Rates

• Open Routing page
• Click on "Upload Rates" button

• Specify files with Origination rates and Termination rates
• Click "Upload"

For simplicity we will use a single file that includes both origination rates and termination rates. Here is what our file looks like:

Although Region and Origination/Termination Tariff are the only mandatory fields, HostedSwitch® allows to upload and update a number of parameters such as:

1. Origination/Termination Billing Settings (Grace Period, Min Duration, Billing Increment)
2. Priority
3. Weight
4. Number of ports
5. RTP proxy
6. Codec Conversion

• Specify the parameters HostedSwitch® Parser should upload from Origination File
• Click "Next"

• Specify the parameters HostedSwitch® Parser should upload from Termination File
• Click "Next"

• You will see "Your rates have been uploaded successfully" message and the number of routes matched

By clicking on the lens "View not Uploaded" you will be able to check the routes our system could not recognize or match

In our case the system could not recognize the row with column titles (which is perfectly fine)

• Select Originating/Terminating gateways (customers) from the list of Available Gateways
• Check "Replace Existing Routes" checkbox if you want to replace already existing routes (if you leave the checkbox unchecked the routes will be added to already existing ones)
• Specify/Check additional fields
• Submit

• Confirm

• Find newly created routes in Routing

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Equipment Setup

In order to make successful calls through HostedSwitch® one must configure:

• Originating gateways to send calls to HostedSwitch® - by typing in one's HostedSwitch® IP address (default IP address is 216.206.188.216) and Port (default H.323 port is 1720 and SIP port is 5060)
• Terminating gateways to receive calls from HostedSwitch® - by adding one's HostedSwitch® IP address to the Access and Routing List of the gateway.

Please check Softphone Configuration article to see how you can set up your SIP gateway by examples of Counterpath's and Sjphone's softphones and Cisco H.323 Configuration article to see how you need to set up your H.323 gateway by example of Cisco.

Test Calls

Video Tutorial

Below you will find a short video tutorial on how to place a test call:

CDRs (Reports)

Call Detail Records (or CDRs) is the main instrument of monitoring your traffic and billing your customers. HostedSwitch® provides comprehensive customizable online tools for viewing and filtering CDRs. CDRs are available at “CDR” page:

In the first column you can specify:

• Time period
• Originator and Terminator (either customer or gateway)
• Phone number (the whole number or several first digits), and
• Reference ID.

All the call details matching the specified criteria will be shown.

In the second column you can choose which data you want to be shown (or aggregation criteria in case of aggregated statistics).

Report Types

CDR Reports divide into the following 4 types:

• CDR – only successful calls are shown.

All the fields in CDR report are self-explanatory. Possible discrepancies between “Duration” and “Billed Duration” are caused by route’s billing settings – Grace Period/Min Duration/Billing Increment.

Note: You can view CDRs for a no more than 7 days period at a time (for example, you can view CDRs for Nov 21 - Nov 27 and Nov 22 - Nov 28, but you can not view successful CDRs for Nov 21 - Nov 28). Requesting CDRs by Phone Number is only available for the time period of 24 hours or less. You can view and download CDRs for the current and previous months, obtaining earlier records is available per request, see Service Agreement for details.

• Failed – only failed calls are shown (with database Return Values and SIP and ISDN causes).

RV is a Return Value received from a dedicated Softswitch instance. Current RV is the value generated on the current route, Final RV is generated when all available routes for the call have been tried. ISDN cause is returned by the terminating equipment. Usually RVs and ISDN causes are very helpful for troubleshooting for a route.

• Aggregate – calls statistics are aggregated according to the specified options.

• Summary – net statistics for customers.

All the statistics are available for download in a text-based format.

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Account Activation

To activate your account you need to:

• Fill out & Submit Service Agreement
• Print out, Sign and Send Service Agreement
• Make 1st Payment
• Confirm Account Activation

Signing Agreement

Please read "Service Agreement" article for step-by-step guidelines how to sign Service Agreement

Making First Payment

Please read this article to find out how to make your first payment.

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