Live Streaming Music & Messaging for CISCO® VVB and CUCM

We are excited to offer this solution to telecom professionals seeking an alternative to static files

- Julie Brown

Easy On Hold CEO

Cisco VVB and CUCM Queue/Hold Music

In the Spring of 2019, Easy On Hold was chosen by Cisco to develop the only Cisco-supported solution for streaming live content into VVB for callers in queue. The solution, provided both in the cloud and on-premise, has been fully validated by Cisco for use in VVB version 12.5.

The solution is part of the Streaming Queue Music software suite, deployed on-premise or from the cloud. For a proof-of-concept please Contact Us.

Cloud-based streaming queue music is approved and best used for installations of up to 500 concurrent connections. For more than 500 concurrent connections a premise based solution is available.

• On Premise Solution

  SQM™ Software for Local Appliance:

  The appliance is typically installed on-premise, on a LAN segment to be close to the VVB servers. The appliance maintains a live connection over the internet to a high quality https audio stream. That audio stream is locally transcoded and server to many local VVB clients, which received the audio as a decoded PCM stream.

  1. Server provides live PCM audio streams for Cisco VVB
  2. CODECs supported include PCM 8 bit mono 8000Hz in ITU-T G.711 µ-law or A-law
  3. Port is configurable, default port 80
  4. Webserver route is configurable
  5. http streaming on LAN is recommended to reduce encryption overhead
  6. https / TLS on a configurable port can be supported. Default is port 443.

  1. Monitoring, logging and reporting to EOH
  2. Remote configuration ability
  3. Scalable to multiple servers
  4. Stream accessed with typical web http GET
  5. Server reports content as application/octet-stream
  6. DNS, NTP and outgoing web connections (https) to Audio stream and Status servers, typically using port 443.

  ---

  SQM Dashboard Page

  1. Provides on site administration information
  2. Shows connection statistics, status and currently playing material

  1. Uses username/password or client certificate authorization
  2. Stream can be played locally to check stream content

  ---

  Appliance Details

  1. PC Appliance which can be imported to run on VMWare or Virtualbox virtual machines
  2. Recommended machine is 1 core CPU, 1 GB RAM, 10 GB hard disk per appliance

  1. Appliance uses a minimal installation of UBUNTU 18.04 LTS server, or equivalent
  2. Appliance application runs within a Docker container environment

  ---

  Number of clients

  1. Server will handle multiple concurrent connections

  1. Server has been tested with to handle over 1500 audio listener clients concurrently on a single appliance

  ---

  VVB Client

  1. Makes connections to the SQM PCM server
  2. Handling of lost streams: client needs to recognize lost stream and attempt reconnect
  3. After retry attempts are exhausted, client should fallback to an alternative source

  1. If required, a load balancer / reverse proxy or a DNS approach can be used to provide redundancy between multiple SQM appliance instances
  2. VVB Clients can be configured to access both local server or cloud hosted SQM servers

  ---

  Status Monitoring

  1. SQM provides a monitoring server with usage statistics and diagnostic information. This also enables remote configuration to allow remote support of the appliance.

  Testing

  1. Multiple client types tested: vvb, as well as curl, wget, ffplay, chrome, edge, firefox browsers (among others)
• Cloud Based Solution

  Cloud Streaming Service

  Cloud-based streaming queue music is approved and best used for installations of up to 300 concurrent connections. For more than 500 concurrent connections (calls on hold) a premise based solution is available (VM Ware)

  1. Cloud service provides live PCM audio streams for Cisco VVB
  2. CODECs supported include PCM 8 bit mono 8000Hz in ITU-T G.711 µ-law or A-law

  1. Port 80
  2. Port 443
  3. Monitoring, logging and reporting functionality

  ---

  Number of clients

  1. Each uniqe stream will handle multiple concurrent connections
  2. Cloud solution has been tested with to handle over 500 audio listener clients on a single stream

  1. Multiple cloud streams of any content can be created to supply more concurrent listeners

  ---

  VVB Client

  1. Makes connections to the SQM PCM server
  2. Handling of lost streams: client needs to recognize lost stream and attempt reconnect
  3. After retry attempts are exhausted, client should fallback to an alternative source

  1. If required, a load balancer / reverse proxy or a DNS approach can be used to provide redundancy between multiple SQM appliance instances
  2. VVB Clients can be configured to access both local server or cloud hosted SQM servers

  ---

  Status Monitoring

  1. Stream status and connectivity is continuously monitored; statistics avaialable on Easy On Hold® client portal

  Testing

  1. Multiple client types tested: vvb, as well as curl, wget, ffplay, chrome, edge, firefox browsers (among others)