Good BYE: easy call quality checking while the trail is still hot
This article is about technical aspects that may make you mad… or happy. Of course if your admin will read it too. To be rest assured, show the article to this kind person.
As usual, we start from the terms and definitions — BYE and SIP. If you know them, you can easily skip two next paragraphs. If you are still reading we want you to know — you are amazing :)
SIP stands for Session Initiation Protocol, it is very flexible and was designed as a general purpose way to set up real-time multimedia sessions between groups of participants. It is used for telephone calls, video and audio multicast meetings, instant messaging conferences — wide range of uses.
BYE is a special command that terminates a call. This is not an acronym, it's just a word that came to IT from the human world but for some reason it is traditionally written in big letters. Just as people talks start after some invitation and end by some proper word, communication between devices looks pretty similar. BYE is the last word in both situations. (Read more about BYE on this Cisco webpage.)
The most interesting part begins when SIP and BYE come together right now over me.
Just fancy: you hear on the phone no intelligible speech but murmur and noise. You say: sorry? hello? are you here? — and then again murmur and grunting. You want to call someone for help. You summon Admin.
Our forecast: when Admin comes, the troubleshooting will start from BYE because decent softphones, and SoftPhone.Pro as well, adds end-of-call statistics to SIP BYE messages and send the reports to SIP server. It's a very good diagnostic tool. When the cause of the issue is found, the solution is a matter of technique, well begun — half done.
Should you desire to say BYE to call quality issues, download Softphone.Pro for Windows and Mac here. If you want even more — real-time monitoring, provisioning, charts — just sign up here and get 14 free days.
YOU MAY ALSO LIKE
Knowledge base Reporting end-of-call RTP statistics in SIP BYE message
Blog Version 4.9: extra reliability, new Google Contacts sync
Blog Yes, we DID: 5 awesome VoIP terms that might make you smile
