help understand how to use * for taxi drivers

[benbarszcz]

Hi,
We are a very new taxi company with four drivers only. And therefore we would like to start small and try to grow with asterisk.
An interesting thing about us is that each driver works for himself an is allowed to build his own customer base.
It is my job to figure out how to employ asterisk hence my questions follow.

We are using Verizon and four iPhones to communicate with each other at the moment (PTT feature). But times come when it is impossible to handle incoming calls and assign jobs.

How to start using asterisk in order for the things to change?
Communication between us so far consists of the exchanging of information about our location when waiting for jobs. One of us picks up an incoming call and assigns jobs depending on the drivers' location. Can asterisk somehow help us automate this?

Thanks, Ben

[hfvoip]

setup one conference room in asterisk , taxi drivers dialing into the confernece room via DID or SIP .
and your customers also dial into conference room,
so your drivers always can talk with each other anytime
and when customers dialing into ,all of your drivers can hear and talk with him

I guess your monthly fee will be 30- 50 $ ,if hosted on public internet VPS server


I am interested to help u

pm to me if u want

[benbarszcz]

Hi,
It is an interesting hint to use a conference room to bridge customers and the drivers.
I am hesitant however to follow this path because the drivers [to my subjective knowledge] would have to be in the conference room at all times.

Let's forget for a while about a conference room.

The primary need of ours right now would be to be able to intelligently route calls. Remember, we are all on cell phones, no radios. Say, a call comes in from a hotel. Only some of us can answer the call because others are first in line at the airport spot. HOw can we announce our "presence" to the asterisk that it rings only those who are "at hand" to take the call?
Is it call queueing?

thanks, Ben

[jpsharp]

You could use call Queuing, yes. You could either build your dialplan so that you have a number that you can dial into and register yourself as busy or availably, or since you have iphones, build a little iphone friendly web interface that does the same and you can just tap a button your phone to mark you as busy or available.

That way, when a call comes in for you to answer, whoever is logged into the queue will get the call while the others won't get bothered at all. You could also have a "failover" so that in the event nobody is logged into the queue the call will go directly to someone's phone so you don't miss the fare.

[benbarszcz]

Ok, thanks for your hint to build a web interface for iPhones to annouce busy/available status. Frankly I do not know how to go about this but it doesn't matter because first I need to fine tune the idea of call Queuing.
At times it would be desirable for incoming calls to be distributed sequentially among the drivers. Them aswering phones as dispatchers and deciding to either pickup a fare or hand it over to somebody else (other drivers).

do I need ACD here or is it actually within the realm of call Queuing?

Thanks,
Ben

[jpsharp]

The Asterisk queuing system will let you do many different types of call distribution. Round robin, ring all, least-busy to name a few.

[benbarszcz]

The Asterisk queuing system will let you do many different types of call distribution. Round robin, ring all, least-busy to name a few.

Hi, The wiki pages explain a lot of details about call queuing.
After some reading a question pops up to my mind. Can call queuing be used even if we do not have many simultaneous incoming calls. Say a single call comes in and we want to use call queuing for equal distribution of fares among the drivers?
Would it be a proper tool to apply to get at?

Thanks a lot of your replies,
Ben

[david55]

exten => 1234,1,Queue(queue)

[jpsharp]

Call queuing can be used for any number of simultaneous calls. From 1 to 10000000. There's no lower limit and the upper limit only depends on your hardware and telco connection.