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telephone monitoring circuitry

Hi

This seems to be an active newsgroup and so I was wondering if there is someone who could help me with a techie problem...

I am developing hardware/software to monitor the performance of a small call centre (~5 phones).

On a daily basis I need to retrieve statistics such as the amount of time the phones are in use, are on hold, how many calls are received, etc.

To this aim, i will need to periodically poll the status of each of the phones (from a PC). Status being either:

  • Not in use
  • Ringing
  • On hold
  • In conversation

So I was thinking that I could have a device which would sit in between the phones and the junction box,and make the status(es) available to a PC via a serial port.

The device would act as a finite state machine,moving from state to state when a RING, DIALTONE or SPEECH (or lack of) is detected. The status could be made available via the use of a couple of pins on a serial port.

As I am not overly experienced either with electronics, or telephone protocols, I was wondering if anybody knows of how this device could be built. Or any fresh ideas as to how I could achieve the same aim??

Many thanks

Will

Reply to
Will Barbour
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why not get that data from your PABX

Bye. Jasen

Reply to
jasen

I do not have access to this.

cheers

Reply to
Will Barbour

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Solving the problems will require schematic details of the system you want to monitor. Small 5 line switching systems don't necessarily conform to the same standards as a CO or PSTN exchange.

Most monitoring systems used to gather this type of data don't sit in between the system and the phone, they simply sit across the line as a relatively high impedance device. Voltage levels will give data as to the actual state of the line (on-hook, off-hook, ringing, line lockout

- eg, one party may have hung up but the other remains off-hook). Speech is not usually monitored due to privacy concerns and there is hardly much point to detecting whether somebody is actually speaking or not. It is usual to "assume" that if a phone is off-hook and not ringing, that two way conversation is taking place. Where a phone remains off-hook for extended periods without having dialled there may be a tone and/or voltage level change to indicate this condition.

Reply to
Ross Herbert

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