It goes without saying that hosted VoIP has always had countless benefits over a traditional on-site PBX system.
One distinct feature that has been utilised by most of our customers over the last 10 years is the ability to take your desk phone home and plug it into the back of your router.
Your phone would come online and all the same settings would appear on the phone’s screen. You’re working on the same extension, able to make and receive calls using your business phone number(s) and you’re still in all the same ring groups just like you were in the office.
Over the years some customers have opted to use a softphone (desktop App/mobile App) instead of a deskphone, which meant you could take your laptop home, open up the App and be working from wherever you had a solid internet connection. Even easier than lugging a laptop and a deskphone around, happy days.
But if you wanted to use both a desk phone and an App under the same extension there was a problem, SiP Cloud only supports one device registration per extension… Never one to let a small problem like that stop us, we came up with a solution.
We would register the deskphone on one sip account, any apps on another sip account, then map the 2 together so they appear to be the same extension, perfect right?
Well not quite, there were 2 caveats:
1. If you regularly use the mobile App and the desktop App, you could only be logged into one at any time, you must ensure you logout of one to use the other, otherwise they will conflict with each causing unexpected call issues.
2. Call history/Call Stats would have 2 entries for each person, one for when you use a deskphone and one for the App, not ideal if you want to know someone’s call totals, or trace back a call but you’re not sure what the user answered on.
Another problem presented itself a few years ago when both Apple and Android enforced new rules regarding application power consumption. The mobile App would previously always run in the background and at the same time keep draining the mobile’s battery.
Our solution was to introduce a new App which had a ton of new features; Bria Enterprise by Counterpath. Which streamlined management, allow auto-updates via our platform, send all user credentials via Zero-Touch provisioning and most importantly, send PUSH notifications to the mobile App which would wake it up when a call came in. Apple were happy, Andorid were happy and we were happy…. well not quite.
If switching between using the mobile App, and letting it run in background mode using Apple or Android PUSH, it would de-register then re-register again using PUSH, this lag has caused users to miss calls, or not be able to answer a call if one comes in during this registration switch. This problem has been exasperated since mass working from home where we had a 500% increase in App users.
Introducing Multisip.
Our new protocol which has been developed in-house by our extremely clever engineers.
The purpose is to allow multiple registrations per extension, which will ensure call analytics always appear correctly no matter what device is being used.
Users will be able to make and receive calls via their deskphone, their desktop App, or their mobile App without any special sip mappings and without the need to logout of one App in order to use the other.
Mobile users will retain both an inbound PUSH registration and an outbound SIP registration ensuring no lag when switching between phone states. The App will always ring when a call comes in no matter what mode it’s in.
And Multisip retains our existing powerful encryption in both registration and calling to ensure your users are safe, calls are secure and cannot be snooped upon or intercepted.
We will be rolling Multisip out to all customers over the next few months along with applying it as standard to all new customers that come onboard from 1st June 2021.
I’m looking forward to this platform feature enhancement which paves the way for a number of new features this year, which we will of course announce shortly.