Category Archives: Be a Business All Star

Be Free of the Expensive Past | Power up your Contact Center with Hosted Switch and DIDs

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phone numbers for contact centersAs a customer of services like Uber or Lyft, we can keep my real phone number private. We can also call a number that is local to us that our vendor owns, but it can ring to my vendor’s contact center in another country. As business owners, we can own phone numbers in several big cities on our planet. People in those big cities can dial that number that we own but it is local to them and reach us conveniently and usually at no charge. The joys of VoIP! We hear people “dis” it in preference to newer communications tech such as WebRTC, but it still powers our personal and business lives in a lovely way.

One of the most interesting business models that benefit from VoIP and direct inward dialing phone numbers is contact centers. Every business dreams of better flexibility, high availability, high call quality, productivity, scalability, flexibility, and security. A good VoIP service enables reasonable pricing as opposed to dinosaur PSTN rates. It powers businesses such as those that need contact centers or that are contact centers to be as global as they would like in over 130 nations with DIDX direct inward dialing phone number coverage.

In the past, businesses built headquarters and hired everyone locally. Each person clocked in and out at this HQ. Today in 2018, employees can work more flexible hours and from anywhere. In fact, a business does not need an expensive headquarters. Freedom is what VoIP and direct inward dialing phone numbers give everyone involved.

Does your business want to empower its remote workers to operate as the contact center for customer service, sales and technical support? DIDx offers the direct inward dialing phone numbers. Just use DIDx API with your service to buy the DID phone numbers as you need them. If you need fewer than 50 DIDs, just refer your communications service provider to DIDx. We’ll do all the work with them for you to benefit.

We’re here to set you and your business free from the expensive and inflexible ways of the past and to embrace all you can be with new and highly approved tech of the present. Sign up for direct inward dialing phone numbers at http://www.didx.net. If you need other services such as security, termination, hosted PBX or soft switch, we know thousands around the world, highly respected companies that can help you get going now.

Best Voice over Internet and other IP Communications Blogs

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VoIP was a life-saver for many students all over the world. It has and does give them the opportunity to write, read, speak and listen to people in South Africa, Australia, Germany, USA, Malaysia, Pakistan and any of the other 214 other nations and territories. VoIP offers schools, colleges and universities to use real life applications in using language and learning and applying any subject. After “VoIP.” life gets better!

So, with that background of our cofounders of this VoIP company in 1999, here are spme of their opinions of the best VoIP blogs available.

  1. #1 VoIP Blog, VoIP News, Cloud Communication Trends | GetVoIP
  2. Dean Bubley’s Disruptive Wireless
  3. Communications and Technology Blog
  4. TMCnet VoIP, CRM, Call Center and Technology Blogs (shameless plug … my “Monetizing IP Communications” is there.)
  5. Small Business Blog · Press8 Telecom
  6. Blog | OnSIP
  7. VoIPWatch
  8. Friendly Tips & Insights on Growing Your Business
  9. CONNECTING THE WORLD, ONE COUNTRY AT TIME! (I am one of the bloggers on this site. The article about Fred of FreeSWITCH is more than interesting and the one title “How to Configure OpenSIPS” is by Bogdan and me… quite informative.)
  10. VoIP Innovations | Custom Communication Solutions
  11. Pacific Telecommunications Blog
  12. Nancy Ridge’s Blog | Alliance of Channel Women

Boost Customer Retention, Revenue, and Service with Direct Inward Dialing

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didx suzanne bowen jenny callicotHow do companies that provide IP telephony and other types of communications gain customers via smart publicity, marketing and service? It is not by telling their current and potential customers that they can buy phone numbers of 130 nations and such every day on the website, email campaigns, blogs and social media platforms.

In 2016, Small Biz Trends shared, “The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70 percent. The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20 percent. 80 percent of your future profits will come from just 20 percent of your existing customers. 65 percent of a company’s business comes from existing customers.”

We have to figure out how to consistently roll out exemplary customer service. We have to empower the people who provide that pleasurable service, the team members. Direct inward dialing phone numbers and innovative analysis and evaluation tools can play a big part in making this business dream a reality.

Mobile network and mobile virtual network operators, voip companies, multi-location contact centers can use direct inward dialing phone numbers to empower their customers. The numbers are ready to manage from anywhere in the world and mapped to any device or even app. DIDx offers an API so that the over 17 million DID phone numbers available on the DIDx platform appear as if the operators and service providers own them before even buying them for resale!

It is time to make your company and even your customers reachable anywhere and anytime. Our API lets you know each time a customer has purchased a DID phone number from you. It bills you and it bills DIDx’s vendors who provide the DID. Assistance with billing is awesome, but did you know that DID phone numbers can help you analyse and evaluate your marketing campaigns? Our call logs include the following statistics for each DID phone number you or your customer buys:

Feel free to sign up to buy and sell DID numbers today. Collaborate with DIDx on LinkedIN, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We love to support our customers every way we can.

Net4Things & Telefonica Offer Telcos Connected Car Biz Opp

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Didx and Deutschland telecom at itw 2018 red shoesDIDX participated in International Telecoms Week 2018 in Chicago, IL. So impressed with Net4Things and Telefonica offering telcos a great new way to increase customer retention and bring in new revnue while getting on board the new trend of connected cars in an IoT and M2M world.

Net4Things communications and marketing expert Maria Gonzalez explains how this works in the video. We can’t wait to share this with our 35,000 communications company members that use our http://www.didx.net. Visit http://www.net4things.com now to get started.

IBM Explains in ET Article: Why Top India Telcos are Ready to Use Blockchain

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Why would leading Indian telecom providers seriously consider launching blockchain technology-based platforms this year? Competition is fierce in the telco world where termination is a loss and communications providers like WhatsApp and WeChat chip away at traditional streams of revenue. Current traditional telecom service providers need new sources of revenue and want to decrease work costs and customer churn. New services such as blockchain technology-based platforms, enhancements via chatbots and AI, and local and international DID number service are real ways to do exactly all the above.

IBM has even conducted several proofs of concepts or PoCs to show how blockchain-based platforms can work beautifully with the top tier India telcos. “We would be surprised if it’s not [in commercial deployment] in 2018,” Jitan Chandanani, Blockchain leader at IBM, told Economic Times.

“The success of bitcoins and cryptocurrencies accelerated the curiosity around the Blockchain technology. As a result, a lot of people are trying to replicate that success story. The conversation that we are having as a company across telcos, governments, and industry, cryptocurrency barely even comes up,” Chandanani said.

Blockchain technology can help create a media platform that will directly connect content creators and cut off intermediaries which reduces expenses. We make a guess that those intermediaries are… for example… Google and Facebook. It can also make changes in supply chain management by eliminating the need for intermediaries again. This concept can be applied across any sector of telecom business. Transparency and speeding up of porting are two other benefits of using blockchain tech.

Read more at https://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/top-indian-telcos-to-deploy-blockchain-technology-in-2018-to-lift-revenues-ibm/64153492.

Budget-Conscious Travelers 💖 DID Numbers

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Budget-conscious travelers  💖 and need DID numbers, aka virtual numbers. Hello, from DIDX.net. Communications companies like cell phone, voIP, and other service providers have this huge market of people like you and me who have made over 35,060,921 trips to another country in 2017. That’s just us in the US. We would rather spend money enjoying the local culture, developing business and friendships and bringing back cool souvenirs than to waste it on high-priced devices and temporary, pay-as-you-go phone service plans abroad.
Here is what is possible because of DIDX.net. You and I can buy DID numbers of 140 nations, set them up to be used within minutes. They can ring to any existing device like our phones. We can own as many DID numbers as we like on one device (phone). We can get rid of any of them when we don’t need them or keep them forever. Most of the communications companies who buy DID numbers via DIDX marketplace to resell to people like you and me… also offer extra cool free features like voicemail, call forwarding, call recording, call logs and more.
When we are traveling on business, DID numbers can help us manage different departments of our company on one device and track search engine optimization projects via call logs.
Here’s the real cool thing, whether we travel a lot for business or personal reasons or both, we can port our current landline, business of mobile phone number to companies that use the DIDX.net platform for their wholesale communications service provision.
Now, we will never lose that important phone number.
When people call that number, they will still reach us. All we have to do is either have the calls forwarded to voicemail or to another phone line or to a SIP service that our communications provider offers us.
Now, if our current phone … communications service provider does not offer DID number service,we should send them to DIDX.net today! DIDX has offered this service to phone companies since 2005. Let’s not have them missing out on making us budget-conscious travelers really happy.

Your VoIP Competitors Will be Like … Look at You, Wow!

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DIDX.net, a wholesale DID number service since 1999 in beta and since 2005 full, trusted delivery to the web, offers communications companies to buy and sell DID phone numbers of …
140 countries
with Fast Activation
and Low Monthly rates.
DID NUMBERS CAN BE USED FOR ALL TYPES OF BUSINESS
such as …
VIRTUAL PHONE LINE
PBX
MOBILE PHONE APP
HOME PHONE
CALL BACK
CALL FORWARD
VOICE MAIL
FAXING
TEXTING
IOT
CALLING CARD
CONTACT CENTER
and other communications services by the world’s most CREATIVE ENTREPRENEURS, OUR DIDX MEMBERS!
NUMBERS ARE AVAILABLE …
PER CHANNEL
PER MINUTE
PER TRIGGER basis
You have choices which is a good thing.
DIDX provides you with 2 FREE NUMBERS to test compatibility and interconnection with your switch.
Be even better than Whatsapp and Facebook VoIP business. Enable your customers to have a local presence via DID numbers of 140 nations you sell to them.
ALL BUYING AND SELLING RUNS ON YOUR COMPANY WEBSITE WITH DIDX working quietly in the background, assisting you to become an industry success, provisioning the phone numbers on your server over SIP.
Our API and web service empower you to integrate the entire inventory of DID (direct inward dialing) numbers on your website. You will be able to make available choices for your users of millions of phone numbers.
Your business will gain an excellent reputation as fast growing with increased revenue, more satisfied
customers and a global presence.
Sellers of DID numbers on the DIDX platform have a ready wholesale buying audience
of over 30,000 members.
Get started today at didx.net. Your company deserves to be a winner!

How to change the “Ring To” address at DIDX to your Asterisk SIP server

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We’ll include a demo video here soon! Let’s learn more about configuring your Asterisk Server with DIDX. Today we will learn how to forward DID you have purchased via DIDX.net to your server.

For that, you will select the option “My Purchased DIDs”.

Here you will see all your purchased DIDs and their details. Now, in order to change the forwarding of your DID, just click on the “Ring To” address.

Next, set the “Ring To” address like this “DID@Your-Server-IP-Address”.

If you are using the default port that is # 5060, then there is no need to define it. If you are using any other port, then you have to define like “DID@Your-Server-IP Address:5060”. Here we are using the default port.

After completing the steps, click on “Update” button.

You have successfully configured the DID forwarding from DIDX.net to your SIP server. After that, you will want to configure SIP trunk on your Asterisk server. Thank you for enabling us to serve you. Welcome to DIDX DID number coverage of 140 nations, no pre-purchase required!

We will add a demo video to this blog post soon.

# SIP clients typically use TCP or UDP on port numbers 5060 or 5061 for SIP traffic to servers and other endpoints. Port 5060 is commonly used for non-encrypted signaling traffic whereas port 5061 is typically used for traffic encrypted with Transport Layer Security (TLS).

Configure OpenSIPS to Receive Calls from DIDX DID Number Coverage

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Hello to your new rich IP comunications business that includes OpenSIPS Open Source SIP proxy/server for voice, video, IM, presence and any other SIP extensions … multi-functional, multi-purpose signaling SIP server and DIDX direct inward dialing!


There is a misspelling of “Interop” at the beginning of this video. We apologize. We deeply appreciate Bogdan Iancu, founder of OpenSIPS for making it really easy to understand how to configure OpenSIPS to receive calls from DID of DIDX.net!

How To: Achieve Interoperability Between DIDX and OpenSIPS

 

In this tutorial, we will expand an existing OpenSIPS server configuration so that it will accept incoming traffic from a given list of DIDX servers.

 

To find out which particular DIDX IP address will send traffic for a given DID number, you may login to your DIDX account and visit the “DID INFO” page of that number. Alternatively, you may visit https://www.didx.net/pages/configs for the list of all DIDX IPs.

 

Regarding OpenSIPS, we assume that it is already running alongside an SQL database. Depending on your Linux OS, you may install and immediately start OpenSIPS from either https://apt.opensips.org or https://yum.opensips.org. For the database, a quick tutorial on how to import the OpenSIPS database schema into your SQL engine of choice is available at https://www.opensips.org/Documentation/Install-DBDeployment-2-4

 

The typical way to authenticate the SIP sender is via digest authentication (with username and password). As this mechanism is suitable for authenticating endpoints (users), it does not fit when comes to authenticate gateways, DID servers or other types of remote SIP Servers. For such purposes is it better to use IP authentication – the SIP sender is recognized and authenticated based on the source IP at the IP level.

 

Typically, most OpenSIPS config files (including the default config file) provide support for digest authentication, so we need to add to your config file the support for IP authentication in order to recognize and trust the calls sent by the DIDX servers.

 

First, open the /etc/opensips/opensips.cfg OpenSIPS configuration file using your favorite text editor. If OpenSIPS is installed from sources, the default path is /usr/local/etc/opensips/opensips.cfg. Within the initial section of the script, load the “permissions” module and configure a database URL for it:

 

loadmodule “permissions.so”

modparam(“permissions”, “db_url”,                  “mysql://opensips:opensipsrw@localhost/opensips”)

 

The “permissions” module is an in-memory storage for lists of IPs and network masks. We will use it to store the list of DIDX servers and validate all incoming calls against this list. With regards to the “validation” part, we only want to perform it when a call starts (i.e. initial INVITE receival). We recommend placing this check near your SIP digest authentication script code, and skipping the digest authentication altogether if the source is whitelisted:

 

 

if (!is_method(“REGISTER”)) {

if (check_source_address(“11”)) {

xlog(“Call from DIDX, skipping SIP digest authentication\n”);

} else if (is_myself(“$fd”)) {

# authenticate local subscriber

…

}

…

}

 

We apply the config file changes by restarting OpenSIPS:

 

opensipsctl stop

opensipsctl start

# or

/etc/init.d/opensips restart

 

Next, we provision the DIDX IPs under group 11 into the SQL database using opensipsctl. Note that you need to provision the DB support via opensipsctlrc file (typically under /etc/opensips/ directory):

 

# list the  current addresses from DB (should show nothing)

opensipsctl address show

# add the addresses one by one to DB

opensipsctl address add 11 198.199.87.53 32 0 udp

# list again to see all the addresses from DB

opensipsctl address show

 

Finally, we refresh the OpenSIPS “permissions” module cache with the new IPs:

 

# list the current in-memory addresses (should show nothing)

opensipsctl address dump

# instruct OpenSIPS to refresh in-memory cache with the DB content

opensipsctl address reload

# list again to see the addresses loaded from DB

opensipsctl address dump

And we’re done! OpenSIPS will now accept IP authenticated inbound traffic from the DIDX service. Awesome!

BTW, also don’t miss a single OpenSIPS Summit! Super informative, hands-on, welcoming event each year in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Welcome to Asterisk Configuration with DIDX DID Coverage of 100 + Nations

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Millions of individuals and businesses on planet Earth use a communications system in which the Asterisk and DIDX direct inward dialing are used for convenient, feature-rich, inexpensive calling. Here is how to configure the technical side of this empowering combination. (We will include a demo video on this blog that goes with this description soon.)

Let’s create SIP trunks in Asterisk with the IP addresses of DIDX SIP server. Use any
preferred editor to edit the “SIP.conf” file. The file path is “/etc/asterisk/sip.conf”.

Here you have to define the SIP trunks with the IP addresses of DIDX.

All the IP addresses of DIDX are mentioned on this link which is “www.didx.net/pages/asterisk”. If you are using USA DID, then the call can come from sip4, us1 and us2 addresses. If you are using UK DID, then call can come from eu2 and eu3 addresses. It is recommended to create the SIP trunk with all the IP addresses which are mentioned on this page.

Let’s create the SIP trunk with “sip4”.
The format for this follows:

[sip4]
type=peer
host=198.101.50.4
context=incoming

Let’s make a second SIP trunk of “sip8”.

[sip8]
type=peer
host=67.228.182.162
context=incoming

Similarly, in this format you will define the remaining IP addresses of DIDX.

Next, you will create an extension in this file. The format for creating the “10005” extension is like
this:

[10005]
type=peer
username=10005
secret=DIDx (Please make sure to use strong, complex password.)
host=dynamic
context=incoming
disallow=all (This will disallow all the codecs.)
allow=alaw (You will allow only “ulaw” and “alaw.”)
allow=ulaw

You have created the extension successfully in the file. Now save and exit the file.

Let’s go to the extension file using the preferred editor. The file path is same; just replace …
“sip.conf” with “extensions.conf”.

You will define your “Dial Plan” in this format where we are using DID 15672446030 as an example:

[incoming]
exten => 15672446030,1,Dial(SIP/10005)
exten => 15672446030,2,Hangup()

All incoming calls on this “DID” will land on this extension “10005”.

Instead of defining all the DIDs separately in the “Dial Plan”, you can customize your Dial plan like this:

exten => _X.,1,Dial(SIP/10005) (Here “X” means number from 0-9 and “.” means any length.)
exten => _X.,1,Hangup()

After this, save and exit the file.

Now you will go to Asterisk CLI to reload all your configuration. For that type “Asterisk -rvvvv”. Then hit Enter.

Now type “reload” and hit Enter. Your configuration is reloaded successfully.

Now you will register the extension on your softphone that you have created in your “sip.conf” file. You can use any softphone such as your own or Zoiper, X-lite, Jitsi, SwitchVox softphone, and Eyebeam because they are easily available and can be configured in no time. In our demo video, we use Zoiper.

In Zoiper, click on “Setting” and then use the SIP protocol. Click “next”.

Type your extension in the “User” box. Type the password that you have defined in your extension.

Last, type the IP address of your Asterisk server and then click “next”. Again “next”.

You will see: “Your account has been added to account list”.

Again, go to your Asterisk CLI. Check if your extension is registered on the softphone or
not by using this command “sip show peers”. Here you can see your extension has been registered.

Once your configuration is completed successfully, dial the DID that you have purchased and had provisioned from the DIDX marketplace, you will see the incoming call on this DID reach this extension successfully which is registered on your softphone.

Feel free to double-check the call on the “Asterisk CLI”. Welcome to your Asterisk server with DIDX direct inward dialing with a coverage of 100 + nations.