InstChat

Asterisk-based Voice Chat Rooms: Asterisk High Density VoIP Gateway ensures continuing success for Instchat customer profile

Overview

InstChat is an entertainment communications company which provides voice personals and conference chat lines for singles throughout the United States. With headquarters in New York City, the company is growing and adding new subscribers daily. InstChat's growing client base will include singles from Canada and the UK within the next year.

Challenge

InstChat recently added more lines to their chat servers to accommodate a growing service capacity. Customers dialing in used to receive busy signals. The company called their carrier explaining that they needed more T1 lines to connect to chat servers. Because of much delay and high toll costs InstChat made a decision that buying more bandwidth to utilize for Voice over IP would cut operating costs and decrease time to market. Voice over IP would enable virtual phone lines to connect to the chat servers and bypass access fees charged by their previous carrier.

The challenge to the InstChat's IT department was how to change over to VoIP without interruption or disruption of service. Management's complete reliance on the current T1 infrastructure meant it was critical that all systems continued to function normally during the migration process.

The Vision Communications Solution

Vision Communications recommended a VoIP gateway solution harnessing Digium telephony hardware and Asterisk PBX Open Source Software technology. A dual processor 3.06GHz Intel Pentium Xeon server class hardware platform inside of a 4U chassis was used as the base of the system. Utilizing Hyper Threading technology, the server was operating as a quad-processor server. The high capacity of each CPU enabled Instchat to handle a high density of calls from a single gateway. Vision Communications further leveraged the technology by provisioning it with multiple carrier gateways displaced across the US. This enabled telephone numbers in almost all area codes within the North American dialing plan to be channeled to the high-density gateway.

Results

Callers could now dial a local number to access the system while the company incurred none of the long distance costs that an 800 number would have. Over 460 ports could now be utilized over one gateway and connect the dense amount of subscribers to the chat servers. This saved both time and money for InstChat and its operations so that they could continue to be a profitable and growing business.

Solution components included:

• 4U chassis
• Asus PC-DL Deluxe motherboard with dual Intel Xeon 3.06GHz HT processors
• Five Digium TE405P Quad span T1 cards
• Asterisk PBX
• 50Mbps of Internet bandwidth from Bandex

Benefits

• "Single Office" experience over a geographically-distributed footprint (DIDs from all over US)
• Easy provisioning of IP trunks to connect to PSTN
• Very low total cost and low cost of operation
• No long distance charges incurred to the company for in-bound calls. (One flat rate for just the capacity)
• High-density solution running on a single platform.