Adding a carrier

Have your carrier’s details and limits at hand. See numbers and carriers for what to ask for.

Do this

1. Open Setup, then Numbers and carriers.
2. Under Carriers, press Add a carrier.
3. Fill in the form (table below).
4. Press Add carrier. The message says “added. Press Test to check it answers.”
5. On the carrier’s row, press Test.

Field	What to enter
Name	A name you will recognise.
Provider	Who the carrier is, for your notes.
Kind	SIP carrier. Choose Simulator only when testing on your own computer.
Address (host)	The server name the carrier gave you, like sip.carrier.com.
Port	1 to 65535. The form starts at 5060.
How it connects	UDP (most common), TCP, TLS (encrypted) or WebSocket.
Username, Password	Leave empty if the carrier trusts your server address instead.
New calls a second	1 to 1000. Starts at 10. This is max_cps.
Calls at once	1 to 100000. Starts at 100. This is max_concurrent.
Order	Calls try the lowest number first, then the next if it is full or down.
Status	In use or Paused.

The form repeats your limits as a sentence: “Up to 10 new calls a second, 100 at once.”

Credentials

The username and password are stored encrypted and are never shown again, by the screen or the API. When you edit a carrier, leave both empty to keep what is saved, or tick Remove the saved username and password.

Limits and order

VoDialer holds each carrier to its two limits. A call goes to the first carrier in order that is in use, not down, and under both limits. If none can take it, nothing is dialed: the person is released without a used attempt. Set the limits to what the carrier gave you, not to what you hope for.

Add a second carrier with a higher Order number as a failover.

Test

Test sends a SIP OPTIONS message over UDP. That is a short “are you there” with no call. For TCP, TLS and WebSocket it only checks that a TCP connection opens. The result shows “Reachable” or “Not reachable”, with the answer time in milliseconds. A reachable server does not prove your login works or that calls will connect.

When a carrier is marked down

If three calls in a row fail at the carrier, VoDialer marks it down and skips it for 30 seconds at a time. Its row says Not answering with the last error. Calls fall back to the next carrier.

Busy, no answer and a person declining are not failures. They never count toward the three.

Row status	Meaning
Working	Taking calls.
Not answering	Down, skipped for now.
Few calls are answered	Fewer than 3 in 100 answered over the last 50 or more calls. The carrier or the caller IDs may be flagged.
Paused	You paused it. No calls go through it.

Pause and Resume switch a carrier off and on. Remove stops new calls at once. Calls already on it are not cut off. The saved login details are deleted.

Not yet

The test and the down rule have only run against the simulator and a local test container. No real carrier has been added to VoDialer, so how real carriers answer OPTIONS, reject calls or limit you is not checked.