Recurring infrastructure costs become an important consideration while setting up distributed and multi-site contact center operations. This is especially true when you have an MPLS network connecting the different sites. Day to day operations require great degree of centralized control over the call center ACD setup and the bandwidth costs will increase dramatically unless the infrastructure is designed optimally. We will discuss some of these considerations below.
There are two essential elements consuming bandwidth, namely voice and data. Voice bandwidth is dictated by CODEC selection and the use of G729 or other compression techniques help reduce bandwidth consumption. The immediate impact from this bandwidth savings is the increased processing power requirements for codec conversions. Also, agent phones at any particular site within the multi-site setup can either register to the phone system withing the centralized call center ACD or have individual site based hardware. Once you decide to place additional hardware at a site, its processing capability could be used for voice compression. These decisions will dictate the final volume of voice traffic through the MPLS network.
Advanced ACD and Dialer platforms for Asterisk come with well established Agent Web Interface and powerful scripting engine. Bandwidth for data will be dictated by the sophistication of the call center software. Well developed scripting tools will be database driven backed by powerful web and database engines. Depending on the architecture, part of it can be local and part centralized. Such design optimization will dictate the final bandwidth requirement.
As you can see, the architecture and planning is dependent on the what you want to optimize your setup for. Asterisk based call center voice bandwidth requirements tend to get more complicated as you proceed to optimize the setup for multi-site operations over the MPLS network. The idling bandwidth while waiting for calls, the bandwidth burst while bridging calls and the steady bandwidth for on-going conversations all contribute to the total bandwidth. Your architecture will dictate what stays within a site and what travels over the MPLS. Therefore it is important to choose a mature technology company with a lot of prior experience setting up multi-site distributed and Cloud installations. The skill-sets required is multi-disciplinary and a good setup will result in long term cost savings and technological advantages. Of course, by selecting Asterisk as your PBX platform you have taken the right first step and now you need to identify and select the right call center software to go with it.