Cisco VoIP CME Labs

by Michael T. Durham
Welcome to NetCertLabs CCNA Voice Lab series. In this lab we will be bringing a little sound to our callers on hold. By having MoH (Music on Hold) enabled on your CME router and a caller is placed on hold, they are assured that they are still connected to the system. Music on hold helps keep callers from hanging up during long waits and provides an outlet to tell your clients the latest news about the company or the current specials. Based on AT&T research: o 70% of calls are placed "On-Hold for 30 seconds or longer, leaving a caller on "Silence Hold" results in a staggering 75% call abandonment rate! Majority of these callers will not call back again. o 80% of callers with silence on-hold hang up within 1 minute. o Callers with Music-on-Hold stay on-line up to five minutes longer o 30% of callers purchased additional products or services as a result of something they heard on-hold o 25% of callers make a purchase based on an on-hold sales suggestion Based on a CNN Survey: o The average person spends 100 hours per year on-hold" o "Without music or messages, 70% of those on-hold will hang up and 35% won't call back" Cellular Marketing Magazine: o "Over 90% of callers prefer on-hold messages over silence" Telemarketing Magazine: o "Surveys show that 25% to 40% of callers make purchases based on information they heard on-hold" Cisco supports two forms of music on hold streams, an audio file on the flash drive or a live streaming source via an FXO or E&M voice card. There are a few restrictions you need to be aware of when setting up MoH. They are: Phones receiving MOH in a system using G.729 require transcoding between G.711 and G.729. For information about transcoding. IP phones do not support multicast at 224.x.x.x addresses. Cisco Unified CME 4.0 and later versions support MOH for internal calls only if the multicast moh command is used to enable the flow of packets to the subnet on which the phones are located. Internal extensions that are connected through a Cisco VG224 Analog Voice Gateway or through a WAN (remote extensions) do not hear MOH on internal calls. Multicast MOH is not supported on a phone if the phone is configured with the mtp command or the paging-dn command with the unicast keyword. More information on MoH can be found at: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/voice_ip_comm/cucme/admin/configuration/guide/cmemoh.html Equipment used in this lab: 1 Cisco 2610XM or 28x1 router 1 VIC2-2FXO, VIC2-4FXO, EM-HDA-3FXS/4FXO, EM-HDA-6FXO, and EM2-HDA-4FXO, VIC-2E&M , VIC2-2E&M * 1 MOD-SC adapter* 1 Cisco 3524 layer three switch (SMI or EMI) PoE switch preferred 1 Personal Computer (desktop or laptop) 2 Cisco 79x0 IP Phone 5 Cat 5 Ethernet Patch Cables
*These items are only needed if you want to have a live stream for your music on hold source

Cisco VoIP CME Lab 14 - Music on Hold

Below is the network diagram for the network that we will be setting up in the CME (Call Manager Express) VoIP lab series.
Cisco 3550 192.168.3.2 Internet DSL/Cable Provided Router 192.168.1.1 VLAN 1 VLAN 3 192.168.3.x (dhcp)

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Cisco 2610XM or 28x1 fa0/0.1 192.168.1.x (dhcp) fa0/0.2 192.168.2.1 fa0/0.3 192.168.3.1

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192.168.2.x 192.168.2.x (dhcp) (dhcp) VLAN 2

This lab assumes that you have configured your lab by following NetCertLabs VoIP CME labs 1 through 13 with all interfaces configured, IP addresses assigned, and other configurations completed. Depending on which version of CME you are running determines the features available to you. Most versions of CME support only one audio stream source. However, CME 8.0 and above support an enhanced MoH system that supports several audio sources and you can select groups to receive a selected audio stream. For example, internal users would hear one source of MoH while external callers would hear a different one. MOH is an audio stream that is played to PSTN and VoIP G.711 or G.729 callers who are placed on hold by phones in a Cisco Unified CME system. The table below shows the three ways you can configure a source of music on hold. When the phone receiving MOH is part of a system that uses a G.729 codec, G.711 MOH must be translated to G.729. Note that because of compression, MOH using G.729 is of significantly lower fidelity than MOH using G.711. Audio Source Description Flash memory No external audio input is required. Live feed The multicast audio stream has minimal delay for local IP phones. The MOH stream for PSTN callers is delayed by a few seconds. If the live feed audio input fails, callers on hold hear silence.

Live feed and The live feed stream has a few seconds of delay for both PSTN and local flash memory IP phone callers. The flash MOH acts as backup for the live-feed MoH. We recommend this option if you want live-feed because it provides guaranteed MOH if the live-feed input is not found or fails. Music on hold requires either a live audio stream, an audio file in .au or .wav format or both. You can record prompts for Cisco Call Manager Express Auto Attendant (AA) on any computer using Microsoft Sound Recorder or any other audio program that can save the file as a .wav file in CCITT ( -law) 8kHz, 8-bit, mono format There is no file size limitation other than the amount of free space on your flash drive. The first step is to record a music on hold file.

Once you have your MoH audio file, you need to upload it to your flash: drive on your Cisco router. LAB_2851#copy tftp flash Address or name of remote host []? 192.168.3.150 Source filename []? hold.wav Destination filename [hold.wav]? Accessing tftp://192.168.3.150/hold.wav... Loading hold.wav from 192.168.3.150 (via GigabitEthernet0/1): !!!!! [OK - 1151954 bytes] 1151954 bytes copied in 6.036 secs (190847 bytes/sec) To enable MoH we need to enter the telephony-service mode and add some configurations. LAB_2851(config)#telephony-service The next command sets the file we uploaded above to be the music on hold file. LAB_2851(config-telephony)#moh hold.wav If you specify a file with this command and later want to use a different file, you must disable use of the first file with the no moh command before configuring the second file The multicast moh command specifies that the audio stream is to be used for multicast and also for music on hold. This command is required to use music on hold for internal calls and it must be configured after music on hold is enabled with the moh command. Cisco recommends that you configure multicast MoH audio sources to use IP addresses in the range 239.1.1.1 to 239.255.255.255. We recommend port 2000 because it is already used for normal RTP media transmissions between IP phones and the router. LAB_2851(config-telephony)#multicast moh 239.2.2.2 port 2000 For more on multicasting Moh see: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/voice_ip_comm/cucm/srnd/5x/50moh.html Should you have music on hold for internal calls on hold and not external callers, (or visa versa), check the codecs and make sure all of your codecs are set to G711ulaw. If you have DSPs installed in your system, check your transcoding settings. Now that you have a working music on hold, lets add a live audio stream to our system. You need to pieces of hardware to make this happen, an E&M or FXO adapter as listed above. You will also need an adapter the connects the RJ-45 connector to your audio source, usually an 3.5mm (1/8 inch) jack.

You can make one of these adapters yourself by buying the 3.5mm stereo male jack and an RJ-45 female jack at an electronics store. Connect on wire to the tip of the 3.5mm jack and one to the back (ground) connector. If you are using and E&M card the two wires connect to the RJ-45 female connectors ping 3 and 6. It does not matter which wire goes to

which pin. And if you are using and FXO card, then you would use and RJ-11 female jack and connect the wires to pins 3 and 4. To configure music on hold using a live feed, you need to establish a voice port and dial peer for the call and also create a "dummy" ephone-dn. The ephone-dn must have a phone or extension number assigned to it so that it can make and receive calls, but the number is never assigned to a physical phone. Only one live music on hold feed is supported per system. The E&M voice interface card (VIC) has a built-in audio transformer that provides appropriate electrical isolation for the external audio source. An audio connection on an E&M port does not require loop-current. Set the following commands if you are using an E&M card. LAB_2851(config)#voice-port 1/0/0 LAB_2851(config-voiceport)#description MOH Live Feed LAB_2851(config-voiceport)#timeouts call-disconnect 1 LAB_2851(config-voiceport)#auto-cut-through LAB_2851(config-voiceport)#operation 4-wire LAB_2851(config-voiceport)# signal immediate If you are connection your live stream through and FXO port, you can directly connect a live-feed source to an FXO port if the signal loop-start live-feed command is configured on the voice port. LAB_2851(config)#voice-port 1/0/0 LAB_2851(config-voiceport)#description MoH Live Feed LAB_2851(config-voiceport)#timeouts call-disconnect 1 LAB_2851(config-voiceport)# signal loop-start live-feed You can adjust the sound level with the input gain decibels command. The range is -6 through 14. LAB_2851(config-voiceport)#input gain decibels 3 Enable the voice-port with the no shutdown command. LAB_2851(config-voiceport)#no shutdown Next we configure a dial-peer for the live audio stream. LAB_2851(config)#dial peer voice 500 pots LAB_2851(config-dialpeer)#description Live Stream MoH LAB_2851(config-dialpeer)#destination-pattern 7000 LAB_2851(config-dialpeer)#port 1/0/0 Now lets create the ephone-dn for the live audio stream. LAB_2851(config)#ephone-dn 70 LAB_2851(config-ephone-dn)#number 7001 This number is not assigned to any phone; it is only used to make and receive calls that contain an audio stream to be used for MoH. To specify that this ephone-dn is to be used for an incoming or outgoing call that is the source for an MoH stream, use the moh out-call # command. LAB_2851(config-ephone-dn)#moh out-call 7000

You can use the command moh out-call 7000 ip 239.2.2.2 port 200 route 10.10.10.1 however, you will not have failover to the file on the flash drive should you lose the live stream. For additional feature commands such as music on hold groups and configuring buffer size, see the link to Ciscos website at the top of this document. After you have setup and tested this lab, please blog your experience on our blog site at: http://netcertlabs.com/netcertlabs-blog Thank You,