An emergency-management centre in Cape Town will soon be using open-source voice-over-internet protocol (VoIP) telephony to deal with and respond to disasters in the region. Cape Town-based VoIP gurus Connection-Telecom recently implemented an Asterisk solution at the provincial emergency management centre based at Tygerberg hospital.
“Our side of it is the control centre for the disaster-management exercise, where the decision-makers and their support people are deciding what to do about a situation,” says Steve Davies, co-founder and “chief stuff officer” at Connection-Telecom.
“The big driver for them was the necessity to keep a recording of everything that has happened,” says Davies. “On traditional systems, call recording is an expensive add-on. In Asterisk, we’re able to do it on the platform itself as we go along.
“They are also expecting to be using a lot of conference calling, which is also built into Asterisk.”
While headlines normally focus on the cost-savings potential of VoIP, especially between branches over long distances, this call-management solution reveals Asterisk’s other core features.
“Sometimes what we do really is call-handling systems, where the use of VoIP is incidental. We use some VoIP in the system because that is an effective way of getting phones on people’s desks and have them ring,” says Davies. Features also include call queuing, call recording and predictive dialling, he adds.
But there are also plans for a wide-area VoIP solution to interconnect other emergency-services centres in the Western Province. They will link via a central server at a local internet service provider, says Davies.
Davies, who is South Africa’s first accredited Digium certified Asterisk professional, has worked with Asterisk for more than four years — first as a hobby “to make cheap calls back to South Africa” while in the United Kingdom.
“At that time, Asterisk had really rudimentary SIP [session initiation protocol] support, so it’s come a really long way,” he says. “The quality and ability of Asterisk has improved a lot.
“More than anything, I think it is because Digium hired a guy called Kevin Fleming who has done a very good job of maturing the process, and making sure the bugs are dealt with and so forth. I think that’s made a very big difference.”
Davies says he contributes to Asterisk development when he has time.
“The jitter buffer in Asterisk, which is used to smooth over lost packets on a VoIP call — I did a lot of work on that,” he says. “We feel that more in South Africa than in other places, because our bandwidth is scarcer than the Americans are used to. The Americans sort of shrug and say get a faster line. We say, ‘it costs this much’ and they don’t believe us.” — Tectonic