Voice has different failure modes from data. A few hundred milliseconds of jitter that nobody would notice on a web page is very obvious on a call, and toll fraud can cost more in a weekend than a year of hosting. That is why we built our own platform.
Colloquy
Colloquy is the voice platform we designed, built and operate for operators who sell telephony to their own customers. It runs on a resilient Kamailio SIP switching core, with Asterisk providing additional services and call logic.
Media is handled by RTPengine, which anchors and relays the voice (RTP) streams between subscribers and carriers. It handles NAT traversal for customers behind firewalls, bridges between IPv4 and IPv6 and between RTP and SRTP, detects dead calls by media timeout so that they are torn down and not billed, and forwards packets in the kernel so it scales to large numbers of concurrent calls.
Built for operators
Colloquy comes with a web portal where you manage your own customers:
- Numbers. Manage the CLIs (number ranges) allocated to you by national regulators such as ComReg and Ofcom, assign them to customers, and set up call diverts.
- Endpoints. Customers connect by standard SIP registration or by IP authentication. Calls can be delivered to those endpoints, or to resilient dispatcher groups using Kamailio’s round-robin and priority routing.
- Control. Lock customers so they can only present their own assigned CLIs. Rewrite From and To number formats per endpoint, per customer or per dispatcher.
- Routing. Manage carriers and least-cost routing, and see the live status of every dispatcher.
Visibility, fraud and compliance
Live dashboards show calls in progress. You can search CDRs and see failed calls, failed authentications and invalid From headers, check where every subscriber is registered, and run SIP traces when something goes wrong. Fraud detection watches for unusual calling patterns, and extensive reports, logging and compliance logging cover what regulators and law-enforcement requests expect.
From the switch to the invoice
Voice is only profitable if every call is rated and billed correctly. When a call ends, Colloquy spools its CDR to Billy, the hosted billing platform from our sister company Island Bridge Billing Systems. A spool overview in Colloquy shows what is pending, along with any calls held back because their call type couldn’t be identified, so nothing slips through unbilled.
Colloquy carries live voice services for operators today, including Telcom and Cablecomm. If you need something different, we also design and run bespoke Kamailio and Asterisk softswitches.