X-lite default setting hangs-up the phone if you are silent

Last updated: August 10, 2016

We have clients using our call center software Q-Suite with a variety of IP-phones and softphones. One of the popular softphones is X-lite and its licensed version eyeBeam. There are times when it takes considerable investigation of a problem to identify the cause. Recently we came across one which warrants a mention.We were investigating complaints about calls being dropped. Generally with VoIP and SIP, this raises all sorts of alarm and as always, we started a detailed investigation to determine cause of the connection drop between the softphone and the our contact center platform. Many of our customers are hosted multi-tenant contact center service providers and the usual suspect is the infrastructure. In this case, the debug log did not point to anything suspicious until we noticed a pattern of agents being silent before the the softphone sending a ‘BYE’. This was happening without any agent action. The SIP user-agent (X-lite) was hanging up. It did not take very long to determine the culprit within the X-lite settings. You have the screen-shot with the red arrow pointing to the checkbox.

X-lite seems to by default, check the ‘Call Inactivity’ check box and inflict considerable headache any to contact center technical staff who relies on default settings. We noticed it when the call center agents were waiting on one end listening to the interaction between their customer and an automated third party verification IVR. The more sophisticated the call center software suite, the more you will have to button down all the setting carefully. Silence suppression is an option not supported by Asterisk.

Other softphones have similar functionality. For instance, Zoiper phones appear to have a “Keep alive time-out” setting that defaults to on. Recent versions allow you to control that yourself under the “Advanced” tab of the Account options. Be sure to check out your particular brand of softphone for the same kind of settings.