I am a developer at a company that markets a remote monitoring system that uses GSM and satellites. Basically if a one of our units detects an alarms status it sends the alarm data to our database and we have a service running on our server that polls the database and a telephone call is generated to the client that owns that unit.

We have two goals in mind. One is trying to remove the hardware portion of our alarm (call) notification system that is attached to our company phone system and the other is speed up the lag time between alarms events and actual calls going out. We looked at a simple solution with Skype but it will not provide the service we need. They have restrictions on amount of calls and different numbers called. We also need a “friendly” caller ID number to appear so call recipients will know it is us calling.

We do not need to accept incoming calls. We need to automatically make multiple concurrent, text to speech, outgoing calls and/or texts to different clients as alarms are received from units. We make as many as one to hundreds of calls a day to one to hundreds of different contact points. We need to be able to write the service in house and have it connect to BroadcastByPhone via a .Net API or by sending requests via XML/http requests and not have to install any hardware.

Does this sound like something BroadcastByPhone can do for us?

Yes, this is a typical outbound call application. With Voicent software, you only need a computer with internet connection. So you can remove the hardware that’s attached to your phone system.

To make phone calls, you also need to sign up to sign up for a VOIP service that supports SIP. Actually almost all VOIP services today support SIP, including Skype (which is called Skype Connect). A SIP account can have multiple channels, each channel for making one call at a time. These VOIP services normally offer Caller ID for their account (called DID number). One example service is Callcentric.

The next thing is to see how many channels you need. To have the least amount of delay for alarm calls, you can take a look at your previous history of the maximum number of simultaneous calls. The delay is usually caused by waiting for a line/channel to be freed.

You can interface with BroadcastByPhone or with Voicent Gateway. If the message is simple, you can use the Simple Call Interface. Each has its advantages. For more details about Voicent interface, please see Developer Home.