Music on hold is always an issue, We get asked many times "can we put such and such mp3 on as hold music" Well the answer is always the same, Yes and no.

Yes in that we can convert any mp3 to be played as MOH as long as you have the relevent PRS licence.

So the answer is then normaly No we wont do it then, Just look at the costs detailed here and you will see why.

So why are we mentioning it here.

Well Asterisk has Music files loaded for MOH and it was always assumed these were licenced correctly and required no additional licence or agreement. Well it seems that some countries are challenging this.

See the following from Digium..

Open Source Asterisk has had for quite some time the ability to play Music On Hold (MOH) to callers as an optionally configured call feature.  Of course, as soon as the code had the ability to play music, there was a general request and obvious concept that Asterisk should include a few default music-on-hold files.  At that point, several people within Digium looked around at the possible files we could use, but all of them had some type of license issues, which is understandable.  We found a company which sold rights to music, and we discussed in specific, painstaking detail what we wanted to do with the files and how they were going to be used.  They agreed that we could do what we wanted and distribute the files with Asterisk and that they were able to provide to us the appropriate license, so we paid our fee and proceeded to pick some likely music.  We then included them in Asterisk in the hopes that the community would find them useful as part of the system without having to search out selections which complied with various copyright issues.  This was a good-faith gesture on our part, and we had a quite reasonable expectation that the vendor from whom we purchased the license was authorized to provide to us a global right-to-use and redistribution capability to the Asterisk community for these sound files.

Well Summer is upon us and the weather is getting hot,

But it not just the weather that's making us sweat. One morning we noticed an alarm notification sms that a customer server was down. On calling their office the lines were out of service!! so we called the customers mobile to see if he had any information. And to his concern and ours the office he was sharing had been closed down and all the servers disconnected.

This is any businesses worst nightmare, One light at the end of the tunnel was that the customer was planning to move offices in 6 weeks time, They checked with their new landlord to see if they could move in sooner and they could. In the meantime we diverted their numbers to the owners mobile phone. Then BT was contacted to see when they could get a line connected to the new office, They confirmed that the could do that on the Thursday of that week, We had the new number but now had to wait till the install was completed before we could place the order for the ADSL2+ service from Gradwell. Late Thursday we placed the order and got a expedited install date of the Tuesday.

The following Tuesday the ADSL came to life, The Asterisk Server connected and all systems go fully working in the new office with minimal interruption of service.

This tale goes to show that by using VOIP what would seem like a disaster needn't be so.

And was brought to you by:

Cyber-cottage.co.uk

Asterisk telephony

Nagios network monitoring

bt.com

Gradwell.net

Aastra telephones