Sitting on the dock of a bay, watching the tide roll away.
Actually, that is a quick way to get fined there, buddy.
You can't use copyright music as Music On Hold.
Well, that's just the first thing that popped in my head
when I thought about it.
Let's talk about Music On Hold.
The feature needed by just about every company to make
customers feel warm and fuzzy when they're sitting on hold.
But also to market their material.
You can say, we also support these features.
Ask your sales rep about it.
You know what Music On Hold is all about.
So let's look at it from an administrative perspective.
music On Hold is just one of those services that you get
when you activate the voice media streaming app on your
call manager servers.
And just as we saw in the opening, now you can tweak the
parameters of it and all of that.
But we start coming into where do we put these servers?
And I threw out centralized just because in a centralized
deployment, let's think about it, you've got all the call
managers in one location.
That also means that you have the phones
themselves sitting out here.
So let's say a phone, 1001, in this office puts another
phone, 1002 on hold, what's going to happen?
Well, it's going to start streaming Music On Hold down
to these devices.
So that's going to start eating up WAN link bandwidth
for a call that should have started and remained local on
that network, just because somebody
pushed the hold button.
So a couple options that we have there.
One if you've got a fast enough WAN link, then you
might say, that's fine.
Let's go ahead and stream it across the WAN.
Two, you can make an SRST gateway.
Survivable Remote Site Telephony, the gateway that
supports the phones, should the call manager server fail.
That can be configured as a local Music On Hold resource,
to where when they start streaming music it actually
comes from that router for those devices.
Or three, you can go ahead and use silence for Music On Hold.
Or that it's just a beep once every I don't know, 5-10
seconds, just to let people know that
they're still connected.
Just for that group of phones at the remote office so that
you don't waste your bandwidth.
Now let's talk about two different
flavors of Music On Hold.
Unicast versus Multicast.
Now, if you haven't gone through too much networking
technology, fly by review--
Unicast one to one.
So if I use Unicast technology, I've got my CUCM
server sitting up here and all these phones.
Every single phone that starts a new stream gets a unique
Music On Hold stream sent to them.
Or I should say, every single phone that puts somebody on
hold gets a unique stream.
Advantage is that your Music On Hold always
starts from the beginning.
If you've got Sitting out on the Dock of a Bay, you won't
start mid-song, or mid-announcement if you use it
for marketing purposes.
But the drawback--
it's actually not network bandwidth, it's the load on
the call manager server.
The more of these Unicast streams it's having to
maintain, the more resources it's consuming supporting
Music On Hold.
Beauty of Multicast, is it's one to many.
So I can start a Multicast stream, provided that my
network is configured for Multicast.
And that song is essentially always playing.
It's one stream.
And think of all the phones as tuning into a radio station.
That's kind of how Multicast works.
Is the stream is always going and as soon as somebody pushes
the hold button, they just tune into that audio.
Advantage?
Essentially, call manager sends one stream per Music On
Hold source.
You might have different songs,
different sources going.
But one stream per source that is playing all the time.
Rather than the resource growing exponentially the more
people that get put on hold.
Drawback is that you may jump in five minutes into this song
that's constantly looping or something.
So maybe you won't get if message says,
thank you for holding.
We value your-- you know, whatever stuff people, I'm
like, whatever, they're just coming up with something.
But if you're actually listening to that, you might
miss that message altogether because it's always going.
Now call manager does support what I call BYOMOH.
It's not a technical--
that's not a term you can Google and find.
I was just thinking, BYO--
bring your own Music On Hold.
As long as you format the file like this, to where it's a
16-bit PCM wave file.
It could be mono, it could be stereo, doesn't matter.
It's coming over a phone so you're not looking for THX
surround sound on this thing.
And you need one of these sample rates for the file.
And it will take that and convert it into all of the
different codecs that are supported by Music On Hold.
You know, G.711, wide-band, G.729.
You'll see it when I show it to you in just a moment.
You can configure up to 51 different audio sources.
So I'll say 1 through 50 is customizable by you.
So you can add whatever you want.
The 51st, or the last audio source, is known as a fixed
audio source.
Sometimes people will take a server and install like a
radio card in there.
Or nowadays with latest versions of call management,
it used to be when it was Windows, you would install a
little PCI card and it could be a radio
card, it could anything.
So where your Music On Hold is actually a radio station, if
you can do that.
Or nowadays, they sell a little USB dongle that sticks
out the back of your server that you can use.
It's got a little RCA headphone jack there.
Plug in an iPod or whatever, and that becomes
your Music On Hold.
That's called the fixed audio source.
So all of those are options for you to do.
And you can choose different sources for different phones
and gateways.
Let's look at the configuration.
So I'm going to come into the call manager.
We're under this media resource world.
Quite a number of them dedicated to Music On Hold.
You got, first off, let's start here with the server.
music On Hold server.
This shows the servers that are there.
They will automagically be listed when they are
registered with the call measure.
Essentially, you activate that voice media streaming
application.
Currently the publisher's the only server running.
I shut down the subscriber.
You can click on.
And you get a number of features far beyond what we
saw on the conferencing.
You can see right here, we can to limit the server Maximum
Half Duplex Stream.
So 250 individual streams a time.
Now Half Duplex, what does that mean?
It means it's only sending the audio.
You're not actually receiving it.
It's not opening a receive stream.
You don't want to hear people singing to the Music On Hold
on the other end of the phone.
So Maximum Half Duplex Stream, you can max that out.
You can look at your hardware and see how many
you can go to, max.
Also Maximum Multicast Connections, how many people
connected at the same time?
If you have 250 users--
I should say 250,000 users listening to Music On Hold
you, got to get some more staff, buddy.
That's too much!
As you go, you say, OK run flag, is
this actually running?
Is the server supporting Music On Hold?
You can even configure the Multicast audio source.
So you can type in what Multicast address you want to
start using.
And there's a certain range of addresses that you can use.
So the phones can tune in and listen to these different
Music On Hold sources based on this port number.
Now you don't really have to configure the phones because
the call manager server will automatically tell the phones,
hey, this is the source that I want you to tune into based on
how we've configured the phone.
So, a lot of that comes more into the media resource
management that's going to be a Nugget coming up.
So that's the base server configuration.
Let's look under the--
let's see, let's go to the Audio Hold Sources.
Every call manager comes with a sample audio source.
It's actually pretty good, it's not bad.
And like I said in one of the previous Nuggets, I can always
tell when somebody just uses this, because it's a well
known song.
I shouldn't say Copyright, but you hear it all the time.
For people using Cisco voice systems.
So you can use that.
That is source number 1.
Or you can click on Add New and this is where you go and
say, OK, well this is going to be source number 2 or 3.
And you can see all the way down to 51, assuming you're
not using the Fixed Audio Source.
So you can come up with all kinds of different sources.
Sales hold music.
Marketing hold music.
Maybe just music only.
You can label all these different source names.
You have the option to play continuously and if the source
is to be allowed multicasting.
Now, when you click on the source file--
let's say we're adding a source, we'd say
source number 2--
source file it comes with a sample audio source.
That's already in there.
And it also has a silence audio source, which can you
guess what that's used for?
That's handy for those remote offices, where you don't want
to use bandwidth streaming Music On Hold.
But what happened is Cisco went into this and they
clicked Upload File, found that .WAV file, using the
parameters right here.
16-bit, sample rates, all that kind of stuff.
Found that .WAV file and then just uploaded it right there.
Now that will max the processor out temporarily on
the call manager server.
Because what it does is take the .WAV file and convert it
into all the different codecs that you can see down here.
G.711 ulaw, alaw g729 in wide band.
So those are all valid sources to stream the audio with.
So once you upload your file, it will be listed right here
as the source file name.
You click on that and then now you've got an audio source
that you can assign to the users.
Now once you've set these audio sources.
So we've got stream number 2, 3, or
however many you configure.
And also, let me show you this too.
Fix Music On Hold to audio source.
So it's hard-coded.
It's Source 51.
There could only be one.
Give it a name and then choose to enable it or
not to enable it.
So once you've configured these different audio sources,
you can go to the devices themselves.
I mean you could get down to the phone level and you could
say, this phone right here uses the audio source of
sample audio source.
And for user hold and network hold.
You might say, what's the difference between user hold
and network hold?
User hold is the user literally presses the hold
button on their phone.
So they hit hold, they go do something else.
Now network hold is they put somebody on hold in some way
other than pressing the hold button on their phone.
So you transfer a call, you go to start a conference call.
Essentially, anything but pressing the hold
button is the user.
So you can get down.
I mean you could say, well I want my phone to have a
different audio hold source.
Now the way that this works is the source phone.
So if I have a phone here, here's Jera.
I'm talking to John across the hall and I press the hold
button, call manager's going to reference my phone's
configuration, rather than John's to figure out which
source file ends up getting used for the hold.
Now, you can imagine that setting the sources, the
network and user hold on a phone by phone basis can get a
little tedious.
Although with bat, sure that's fine.
But you also have the ability to do a common device
configuration.
If you go to the device menu, device settings, common device
configuration.
Nothing there.
I click on Add New and that's where I can say, OK, for
common the IT department ends up using these
audio sources for that.
They have this softkey tab here.
This is where you can do some batch configuring.
Some common configurations that you can apply to a group
of phones that are not inside of the device pool.
So that's another way that we can change the audio hold
source for them.
Last area of Music On Hold I want to show you, before we
start getting into the resource management, is the
service parameters.
So if I drop down to the service parameters, one of the
things that you'll notice is even though it takes the Music
On Hold source file and converts it into all the
different codecs, G.729, wide band, G.711, and u- and alaw.
The only Music On Hold codec that is on
by default is G.711.
Well, they call it "mu law," because that's how you say it.
But it's actually, I don't know if you've ever seen G.7--
it's one of those Greek letters where they got the U
with a little widget above it.
So that's what the ulaw is, but you can say, well, I also
want to support alaw.
And click on that, as well.
I also want to support G.729.
And this message keeps flashing up and saying, by the
way G.729, not a good call.
This is optimized for speech.
It's going to be marginal.
And a lot of times they'll even cut out
altogether if you use that.
But they're saying you can do that.
Hold down the Shift if you want to select multiples.
Or control key if you want to grab a few and update and now
you're able to support multiple codecs running music
on hold at the same time.
It says, how do you want the quality to be
for the fixed audio?
Because the call manager on the fly is converting that
fixed audio source into a music codec.
The higher quality you go, the more CPU it's going to use for
that fixed audio.
Also gets into what kind of DSCP do you want to-- well,
this actually has nothing to do with Music On Hold.
This is for call manager to call manager communication.
But this one is for the Music On Hold.
This means that my Music On Hold is getting the same
treatment, which is expedited forwarding, as
normal voice does.
Now you may say, you know what, if push comes to shove,
I am going to downgrade this to maybe AF31, that's assured
forwarding.
31 is IP precedence 3, with a low drop preferences.
Versus AF 30, man, it's been a little while
since I've done that.
But AF33 is assured forwarding, IP precedence 3,
with a high drop precedence.
At least, I think.
If I remember right.
It's been too long since I've stared at that.
But that allows you to downgrade the quality of
service that Music On Hold is getting.
So that way, if voice conversations versus Music On
Hold, I'm going to say, well, I'm going to drop
the Music On Hold.
You are now free to create Music On Hold to
your heart's content.
I hope this has been informative for you and I'd
like to thank you for viewing.