Over the past 12 months, I’ve been heavily involved in the development of high-speed dialers. While many companies published a prolific number of automatic dialers (power, predictive, broadcast) – none of these companies ever announced there top speed dialing capability.

An so I ask myself: “What is the reason not to release these numbers publicly?” – interesting, isn’t it. So, I decided to experiment myself and see if I would release public numbers for my dialer. I’ve designed my dialer to be capable of generating upto 35 calls concurrently. My questions was this: “While the dialer is fully capable these numbers in a test scenario, will this number be reached in real life?”

So, I started experimenting with my code – doing a very simple test. I’ve installed my dialer on a Dual Quad Core system, 8GB RAM, and a RAID-1 array as the storage. Now, I’ve setup the system to generate up to 35 calls every second, allowing the server to sustain a total of 180 concurrent calls – 360 channels.

What happend was actually this: the dialer generated about 180 dials within a period of about 8 seconds, and then, simply waited till some of the calls completed in order to generate additional calls. Ok, that is understandable, however, what is the throughput of the dialer? So, I decided to do another test, I filled up my queue with a total of 50,000 records. In addition, I’ve arranged with my carrier to terminate the calls to on of their SigValue systems, to sustain the enormous number of inbounds. In addition, I asked them to perform a small measurement of the average call inits per second. I was shocked with the result!

While the dialer simply peaked upon startup, after 20 seconds of operations it started normalizing at around 6 call initiations per second. But how can that be? how can it be that a dialer capable of dialing 35 calls is slowed down to crawl? – the reason is simple, the latency imposed by the PSTN/VoIP network, the time it takes for the calls to terminate and the actual time the call is left on the air, while the dial happens. All these factors together had given me the notion that there is no practical top speed, as it is in direct relation to the demographics of the dialer operations.

Having said that, is it possible to devise a formula to calcualte this number on a per demographic basis? maybe on a per PSTN/VoIP carrier type? maybe a combination of the both? will a formula such as that will enable for the better creation of broadcast/predictive dialer? – no use dialing tons of number into a demographic that can’t handle it, while at the other side of the spectrum, what demographics will benifit from the utilization of an automated dialer?