Thanks to Digium, Asterisk has connectivity to Skype network. It was announced in the fall of 2009 and we tried it out with our office PBX and were very satisfied. We have decided to add support to Asterisk Skype connectivity within our call center software Q-Suite.

For a call centre owner, this is beneficial because it allows you to do a few new things:

  • Inbound call centres can now accept calls over the Skype network, they can even have a “click to call” button on their web site.  The Skype calls will go into the same queue as the PSTN calls. SkypeIn virtual numbers will also work in the same way.
  • Agents working remotely (from home) can nail in over Skype. One advantage of this is that Skype does a much better job of going through firewalls than your average SIP client.  This will cut down on IT support as a technician won’t have to fight with configuring a $29.99 router’s port forwarding settings.
  • SkypeOut can be used for outbound calls for competitive long distance rates.
  • Skype uses the G.729 codec (included with Skype for Asterisk) which saves bandwidth on the outbound trunks