Audio Conferencing Services

Description

Nine of the top ten conferencing service providers worldwide depend on RadiSys Convedia Media Servers for their next-generation VoIP audio conferencing infrastructure.

Making sound business decisions is often a collaborative effort among a group of people. In situations where a face-to-face group meeting is uneconomical or just too difficult, audio conferencing services allow the team to share ideas and solutions through a voice conversation from wherever they happen to be.

Early attended audio conferencing services required operator assistance to schedule conference bridge resources and coordinate the call, which was inconvenient and became a barrier to adoption. With the subsequent introduction of unattended or reservationless conferencing, individual users now have the power to schedule a conference on-demand, resulting in a rapid growth for conferencing minutes and revenues for Conferencing Service Providers (CSPs), as well as growth in conferencing systems sold to enterprise customers. Users of reservationless conferencing services are typically assigned their own conference bridge phone number (often set up as a toll-free access number), which multiple participants can call at a specific date and time to share a conversation. Basic 3-way conferencing calling is even available now as a standard feature in many residential phone plans.

Challenges with traditional audio conference bridge solutions

In historical conferencing architectures, CSPs used circuit-based TDM audio conference bridge equipment to integrate conferencing application logic, TDM interfaces, and audio mixing circuitry into a single piece of proprietary networking equipment. While these integrated products simplified deployment of initial basic conferencing service offerings, they were also extremely inflexible to feature enhancements. Monolithic TDM audio bridge equipment locked CSPs into their initial vendor choices for future feature enhancements, making feature enhancements and integration with other front- or back-office systems difficult. The resulting infrastructure was expensive to operate, enhance, and maintain.

Today, CSPs and enterprise conferencing users need infrastructure solutions that reduce their cost/port and ongoing operational expenses, while delivering new capabilities to differentiate their service offerings.

RadiSys Convedia Media Servers are the leading choice in IP media process ing for the Conferencing Industry

RadiSys Convedia media servers support a broad set of IP media processing features essential for nextgeneration VoIP conferencing applications in CSP and enterprise conferencing environments.

In a next-generation VoIP conferencing data center, the functions of a traditional TDM audio conference bridge are decomposed and replaced with individual “best-of-breed” functional components interconnected using open, standards-based interfaces. Application and signal processing are now hosted on an application server, and are functionally separated from actual media processing. Media processing is delivered by the RadiSys Convedia media server. The application server controls the RadiSys Convedia media server using SIP and Media Server Markup Language (MSML), a powerful and extensible SIP-based control interface specifically designed for feature-rich IP media server control.

CSPs and enterprise communication infrastructures continue to have a large majority of subscribers who use traditional telephony devices connected to the PSTN through TDM- based circuits. In a next-generation VoIP network, a media and signaling gateway element converts these external TDMbased circuits to the internal IP infrastructure, splitting out SIP-based call signaling information for the application server, while the Real Time Protocol (RTP) audio media streams are terminated on the RadiSys Convedia Media Server for feature-rich IP media mixing.

A next-generation infrastructure built around RadiSys Convedia Media Servers costs less then the monolithic TDM-based audio conferencing bridge along all the dimensions of capital cost, space, power requirements, and ongoing maintenance. And since all the call control and media processing is done in an IP environment, integration with web-based conferencing capabilities and graphical user interfaces facilitates intuitive, seamless multimedia conferencing service offerings.

RadiSys Convedia Media Server offer industry-leading capacity and redundancy features as well, at a price-per-port substantially lower then TDM-based conference bridge equivalents. The combination of scalability, reliability, features, and economics in RadiSys’s product offering has made us the IP media server of choice in nine of the top ten conferencing service providers around the globe.

Next-Generation VoIP Conferencing Architecture

Media Server Capability	Media Server Feature	Benefits
Large Capacity	Up to 22,800 ports on a single RadiSys Convedia CMS-9000 media server. Up to 1,900 ports in a single conference mix.	Scalable to large deployments. Requires less power and less space. Can mix many participants in a single audio bridge.
Cascaded Conferences	Allows creation of contributory conferences that can be “cascaded” into a main conference mix.	Delivers even larger conferences. Allows bandwidth savings for geographically dispersed conference calls — create a contributory conference mix in each region, and then back-haul as a single RTP audio stream to a centralized master conference mix to save bandwidth cost.
Redundancy	Full 100% redundancy on all CMS-9000 media server system cards including: N+1 redundancy on Media Processing Cards (MPCs) 1+1 redundancy on System Control Cards (SCCs)	No dropped conference calls.
N-Loudest Mixing	The application defines the number of loudest speakers (i.e., the “N-loudest”) to dynamically select for inclusion in the audio mix. An N-loudest user hears the other N–1 streams, but not her own. Configurable on a per-conference basis.	Provides improved audio clarity, intelligibility, and conference quality.
Personalized Mixing	Allows a user to hear a personalized audio conference mix. For example, suppose there are three parties in a conference: A, B, C. A (customer) hears B but not C B (agent) hears A and C C (supervisor) hears A and B.	Exclusive to RadiSys. Versatile feature for many applications including IP contact center coaching/whisper features, online gaming, and audio chat rooms.
Active Speaker Notification	Media server dynamically reports changes in the active speakers in a conference mix.	Allows enhanced speaker-based conference features, such as highlighted display of the active speaker on a web-based moderator GUI screen.
Automatic Transcoding	Media server transcodes between different audio codecs terminating in a conference mix including G.711, G.723, G.726, G.729, G.722 and AMR.	Provides increased deployment flexibility.
Play Audio to Selectable Participants	Announcements can be played conference-wide to attendees, or announcements can be heard by designated attendees only.	Delivers additional revenue streams for the business (i.e., selling conference recordings). Allows addition of differentiated and helpful features in your conferencing service offering.
Use of Variables in Audio Playback	Media server can dynamically assemble audio clips and construct announcements in real time, in over 40 supported languages. Example: “Welcome to Mycorp’s conferencing service”. “Your conference begins in” “five” “minutes” “and” “fifteen” “seconds”.	Provides unprecedented power and flexibility for audio announcement generation.
Record Conference Audio	Audio can be recorded in real time, either as streamed audio to an external HTTP or NFS server for conference recordings, or to internal storage suitable for short transient recordings (i.e., “”, “has joined the conference”).	Delivers additional revenue streams for the business (i.e., selling conference recordings). Allows addition of helpful features in your conferencing service offering.
DTMF Collection	Either inband or out-of-band using RFC 2833 telephone events. Digit maps can be unique per participant.	Important for many purposes including collecting conference bridge IDs, security IDs, or selecting menu options.
Audio Gain Control	Control agent can adjust input audio volume for one or more users, as well as outbound volume to all participants. Configurable on a per-participant basis.	Infinite participant volume control.
Automatic Gain Control (AGC)	Media server can be activated to automatically adjust level of input and output signals to a specified target level.	No one user dominates the conversation, while no user is too soft to hear.
Video	RadiSys Convedia media servers also support H.263 and H.264 video announcements, video record and playback, video conferencing with voice activated switching, or quad-split continuous presence displays.	One platform for all your current and future multimedia conferencing needs.

Platform for Multiple Enhanced Services – Including Video

Once deployed in an audio conferencing infrastructure, RadiSys Convedia media servers can also be reused for a variety of additional enhanced services. The exact same software and hardware platform also supports extensive IP video media processing features as well, allowing service providers to reuse their RadiSys Convedia media server investments to support a broad range of enhanced IP-based communication services including video conferencing, IP contact center applications, multimedia messaging, audio/video transcoding, IP Centrex, network gaming, or speech-enabled portals.

Numerous Deployment Options for Conferencing Service Providers

Many of our existing CSP customers have developed differentiated and unique audio conferencing applications to integrate with their RadiSys Convedia media servers using the feature-rich SIP/MSML based control interface. Alternatively, RadiSys can introduce you to one of our conferencing application server partners who already offer SIP application server platforms with pre-developed audio conferencing feature sets, along with service creation environments to implement your own uniquely customized applications.

Growing list of Solution Partnerships and Deployments

Our focus on IP media servers eliminates any potential competitive overlap with our application solution partners, making us an ideal partner for conferencing application vendors looking to improve the scalability and economics of their solution offerings. RadiSys Convedia media servers already interoperate with many leading application vendors, who have a growing list of deployments with leading service providers around the world.

Empower your Audio Conferencing Solution with RadiSys Convedia Media Servers

RadiSys is the leader in IP media processing solutions for the audio conferencing industry, with hundreds of thousands of ports deployed worldwide. To learn more about improving the scalability and economics of your conferencing business, please contact RadiSys today.

More Information on Audio Conferencing Services

White Paper - Improving Audio Quality in VoIP Conferencing Services
Audio conferencing services based on circuitswitched networks and audio bridging equipment have provided hosted conferencing users with a benchmark for pricing and quality in voice communications.