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hummingbird hoedown
Sep 23, 2004


IS THAT A STUPID NEWBIE AVATAR? FUCK NO, YOU'RE GETTING A PENTAR

SKILCRAFT KREW Reppin' Quality Blind Made Products
A couple of years ago I saw a picture of a desk with a strange looking phone on it. The phone had a keypad and a bunch of buttons but the weirdest thing about it was that it had two handsets. I thought maybe it was so two people could listen and talk on a conversation without being in speakerphone or a way to share a phone between two people.

In the last few weeks I discovered that they're called trading turrets.

Here's an example of really nice one.

I've become obsessed with learning about these things and I've discovered two things: they're very expensive and there aren't many soft versions of them.

They have all kinds of interesting functions like hoot and holler, intercom, multicast, and other stuff.

I've read that these turrets can end up costing $10,000 per seat sometimes, inclusive of hardware and support software and licenses.

I've been able to find a single provider of a trading turret softphone from this company. It looks old and costs $1,000 for the software.

Can someone tell me more about these turrets or if there are cheaper alternatives to the professional grade versions sold to financial companies?

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Jose Oquendo
Jun 20, 2004

Star Trek: The Motion Picture is a boring movie
PM goon Jerk McJerkface.

He knows all about these.

Super-NintendoUser
Jan 16, 2004

COWABUNGERDER COMPADRES
Soiled Meat
Oh yeah, so I got your PM. Trading Turrets. That's a huge world. Well not really, since there's one company that runs and controls everything to do with them IPC. They have it entirely on lock down.

If you are looking for an entire system with lines, turrets, etc, that's an entirely different discussion, but if you are looking to just buy one turret to play with, that's a little simpler, but still kind of complicated.

The primary focus for them is hoot-n-holler lines for trading applications. Think of it like having a ton of speaker phones all dialed in to someone at the other end 24x7, and you can just push to talk to whichever channel you want, and they can talk back to you whenever. Most traders have a desk with like five or six speaker boxes and push button mics, but these turrets consolidate them all into one unit with channels. the admin links the dedicated analog voice lines (no one does this with a SIP backend because it'd never work well) to your speaker lines.

Traditionally, you buy an IPC digital analog system, and ten or twenty turrets for maybe $1000/turret plus management. IPC delivers a T1 with 23 voice channels on it, and you pay $1000 per month per termination line. It's an expensive world since the client uses it to make a ton of money. IPC is also very unhelpful and is very aggressive about not liking when you use a non-IPC system with their lines.

So there's only a handful of companies that make an IP SIP Compatible turret, IP Blue, the one you linked (I know nothing about that), Speakerbus (I'm familiar with) and IP-Trade, of which I'm certified and I've installed tons (not lately, I left that job about three years ago but I can't imagine it's changed much).

http://www.iptrade-networks.com/

These devices usually require some kind of server backend and that integrates with your phone system. In the case if IP-Trade, you have to have two servers in the backend, both running Windows (they can be VM's but they don't officially support that). One server does provisioning and management, running IIS and SQL, and the other runs the telephony backend since muxing and transcoding all the channels is very complicated and resource intensive. It's a large footprint, and they won't just give you the software to play with for one turret. One turret itself costs thousands anyways, so your initial cost would be something like $10,000 just to get up and running. I have yet to see a company that will just sell you one. Infact, when I worked for a hedgefund my manager got into a huge altercation with the salesman from Speakerbus, because my manager wanted to give him a check for a turret and just let me figure it out, but they guy was trying to tell him they don't work that way.

I'm one of the few people to get IP-Trade working on an Asterisk/Switchvox system. Typically they peer them with Cisco call manager, but my client wanted Asterisk, so I spent weeks looking at Wireshark traces of the SIP sequences to figure out how it works, and it was a huge pain. They never worked well, and they always disappointed our clients, because they sounded like garbage. All the transcoding:

incoming T1-> digitial to analog converter -> analog to SIP converstion in PBX -> hand off to IPTrade -> Handoff to turret

Introduced tons of lag and noise, and calls would drop off, and randomly redial. It was a complete and utter nightmare and I hated dealing with it. The users were all high stress energy traders and if a call hiccupped they'd lose deals and trades and call and scream at me. I used to have to sit on the trading floor mirroring the network interface of the traders phone and rebuild all their calls to figure out where the noise was introduced. It was terrible, and one of the reasons I quit that job.

Comically anecdote: I was supposed to upgrade a foreign national bank's turret system to the latest software version over weekend, but I quit the job, so my last Friday was the day before the work. No one at my company could do it, so they cancelled the task, and the client called me personally to yell at me. The guy told me what I did was bullshit and that he demands I come work for them and do this job. I told him respectfully no, and he screamed until I basically hung up on him. There was 0% chance I'd get that major upgrade (like five years of software versions with about ten intermediate required stops) working over the weekend with out support from the vendor (who they didn't pay for support), so it'd be a complete disaster. Eight guys, doing commodity trading that the turrets were their lifeblood, and there was absolutely no way I'd have them working by Monday morning. Also since they had Cisco Call Manager, and I would have no access to that to do any sort of analysis. It was just insane.

hummingbird hoedown
Sep 23, 2004


IS THAT A STUPID NEWBIE AVATAR? FUCK NO, YOU'RE GETTING A PENTAR

SKILCRAFT KREW Reppin' Quality Blind Made Products

Jerk McJerkface posted:

Really helpful and interesting information.

I don't have a background in telephony or computers so bare with me.

I'm wondering why there isn't an exclusive IP-based turret system that uses a company's existing internet connection. Why won't SIP work? If more bandwidth can be had, why can't more simultaneous connections be had as long as a system is designed with an efficient codec? It seems like moving the concept from analog to digital would reduce overhead by enormous amounts, with virtualized servers and web-based dashboards instead of these dedicated pieces or hardware. If Mumble and Teamspeak can host hundreds of people on a single channel, why can't a soft trading turret?

Super-NintendoUser
Jan 16, 2004

COWABUNGERDER COMPADRES
Soiled Meat

Hummer Driving human being posted:

I don't have a background in telephony or computers so bare with me.

I'm wondering why there isn't an exclusive IP-based turret system that uses a company's existing internet connection. Why won't SIP work? If more bandwidth can be had, why can't more simultaneous connections be had as long as a system is designed with an efficient codec? It seems like moving the concept from analog to digital would reduce overhead by enormous amounts, with virtualized servers and web-based dashboards instead of these dedicated pieces or hardware. If Mumble and Teamspeak can host hundreds of people on a single channel, why can't a soft trading turret?

Mumble and teamspeak have a server that runs and muxes all the audio channels and sends you a single audio stream. Trading turrets maintain 40 or 50 individual audio streams simultaneously. I can't imagine the audio workload is comparable. I guess a comparison would be to load up forty instances of a teamspeak server and open calls to all of them simultaneous and see how it performs. Also the idea that bandwidth directly equates to call quality and performance isn't accurate. SIP and RTP are very hard to tune to work well over a network. For a ten person office you'd normally have maybe 3 or 4 simultaneous audio calls, but then for turrets multiply that by 50 channels across 10 users. It's a lot more traffic.

Also the other end typically terminates at the NYSE or CBOT where entrenched customs and monopolies control what you can do. This is a device designed for a niche, lucrative industry. Anything that makes money costs money.

Saying it's simple to add more bandwidth and mumble is free is like saying that since you can run Freepbx for free on anything why does anyone charge for phone service?

Edit: there aren't "more efficient codecs" like that's a magical solution. A better codex requires processing time and CPU power to crank it. The trade-off is size/speed vs quality. Now multiply it by the 500 channels.

An analog line nearly all the time it just works and sounds good. When the far end shouts an offer you have seconds to understand and reply. Not hearing or hearing incorrectly or your response being misheard can cost you thousands.


Side note:
IP trade actually launched and iPad app that emulates a turret but there's limitations on channels and it still requires the server backend and is still expensive.

Super-NintendoUser fucked around with this message at 00:50 on Feb 2, 2017

Super-NintendoUser
Jan 16, 2004

COWABUNGERDER COMPADRES
Soiled Meat
One more item. The analog lines are super simple. It's almost literally one copper wire from one side to the other. You can just get a speaker box and a goose neck with PTT for like fifty bucks. A lot of smaller firms have three or four lines and they use that. Switching to SIP would give almost no benefits. Just one small line in the server closet and one patch to the desk and you are done.

With that in mind there's no market for a small scale system and then a large scale system requires a lot more complexity so you can't just spin up a crappy VM and start processing a hundred simultaneous audio streams with call recording and tracking etc.

hummingbird hoedown
Sep 23, 2004


IS THAT A STUPID NEWBIE AVATAR? FUCK NO, YOU'RE GETTING A PENTAR

SKILCRAFT KREW Reppin' Quality Blind Made Products
1. So is a hoot-n-holler channel (or room? What do you call an instance of a hoot-n-holler?) effectively, but not technically, the same as a mumble or teamspeak channel? That is to say is it simply a collection of users where anyone can speak and everyone will hear them?

2. Are hoot-n-hollers reached with phone numbers or are they hosted on a server with some other way to gain access to them?

3. Do turrets and their associated software and servers perform a similar function to a conference call hosting service? I never really thought about it, but the reason why people have to dial in to a conference call is because no single person's phone can handle 20 or 30 people calling in so the conference call service has the hardware and software to make it happen, correct?

For the sake of the next few questions, let's assume there are ten hoot-n-holler rooms each with 50 callers on each for a total of 500 lines of activity.

4. Are there eventually 500 physical phone lines for all of this activity when all is said and done? Does each call from the turret to the hoot-n-holler number need its own line?

5. Do high volume turrets have dozens of physical lines dedicated to that individual turret so a trader/analyst/whoever can be on the ten hoot-n-hollers and make multiple calls at the same time?

6. Do all of the lines to a turret have their own number or do they only have a single number so the back end will pick an available line when the one number is dialed?

7. Is it correct to say that the bottleneck to achieving the same goal with IP is processing power and bandwidth? Which one is more important?

Super-NintendoUser
Jan 16, 2004

COWABUNGERDER COMPADRES
Soiled Meat

Hummer Driving human being posted:

1. So is a hoot-n-holler channel (or room? What do you call an instance of a hoot-n-holler?) effectively, but not technically, the same as a mumble or teamspeak channel? That is to say is it simply a collection of users where anyone can speak and everyone will hear them?

Sort of. To be completely clear a Hoot-n-holler line, or ARD, or MRD, or Ringdown (all the same thing with different names) is essentially a point to point single copper phone line. It has no buttons to dial, nothing, you pick up one end, and start talking to the other (which should already be off hook, if not it'll buzz and it can be picked up. Think the Batman-Commissioner Gordon line. Typically it's one user to one user, however the PBX can answer the end and put it in a conference room with more than one user, however this is almost never done because that's not the culture and point of the lines. They are 100% of the time used for one investor to talk to a contact at a stock trading floor. I'd call them one "line" "channel" or "ringdown".

Hummer Driving human being posted:

2. Are hoot-n-hollers reached with phone numbers or are they hosted on a server with some other way to gain access to them?

No. They are direct connection between two end points. They do not have numbers (other than a circuit ID for billing/identification. Otherwise you can't dial their number, they do not use the PSTN.

Hummer Driving human being posted:

3. Do turrets and their associated software and servers perform a similar function to a conference call hosting service? I never really thought about it, but the reason why people have to dial in to a conference call is because no single person's phone can handle 20 or 30 people calling in so the conference call service has the hardware and software to make it happen, correct?

No. A conference system mixes multiple lines into one path and your phone allows basically one in out analog path at at time. Your turret allows 50-100 discreet and separate in-out analog paths. It's like 100 speaker phones with 100 lines all in one box with one mic and a push to talk button for each channel.

Hummer Driving human being posted:

4. Are there eventually 500 physical phone lines for all of this activity when all is said and done? Does each call from the turret to the hoot-n-holler number need its own line?

Each broker in your team may have 10 or 20 hoot n holler lines. Your company can have as many brokers as they need, my clients had about 100 lines, distributed between about 20 guys. One client had 75 lines, but only 2 turrets. This was on IP Trade. In the server closet we had four T1's (each can bring 23 Ring down channels), going into the PBX, but then of course it was IP from there. If you had a straight analog system, I suspect you'd have a copper pair per ringdown per turret, so if you had 50 ring downs, and then 10 per turret, it'd be ten copper lines to each turret, probably in a big RJ connect that did 25 pairs.


Hummer Driving human being posted:


5. Do high volume turrets have dozens of physical lines dedicated to that individual turret so a trader/analyst/whoever can be on the ten hoot-n-hollers and make multiple calls at the same time?


Yes, the whole point of the hoot-n-holler lines and turrets is that all lines are live to you all the time, anyone can talk whenever they want and you can respond individually to anyone you want whenever you want.


Hummer Driving human being posted:


6. Do all of the lines to a turret have their own number or do they only have a single number so the back end will pick an available line when the one number is dialed?


Again, no number for a turret. In the turret world there's two states for each end point, on hook or off hook. If both ends are off hook, like they should be 100% of the time, you just talk. If one is on hook, you can typically press a "ring down" button that either buzzes the far end or causes it to automatically hook so you can talk. This only happens maybe when a system reboots or something and the line is hung up, which should never happen because again the point of ring downs yada yada yada.


Hummer Driving human being posted:

7. Is it correct to say that the bottleneck to achieving the same goal with IP is processing power and bandwidth? Which one is more important?

The bottle neck is 100% that IPC controls the lines. They control the entire end to end delivery of the entire system of lines, and do not like when you try to use a non-IPC system and they give you almost no help, and have no technical resources to assist in integrating their lines with mysterious signaling into your system. Assuming you over come that and haven't been fired by your client, yes, the bottleneck is processing and bandwidth. Which is more in important? I have no idea, but the system needs to work 100% of the time with good call fidelity. SIP and RTP in general are decent, but not fantastic, and if all of a sudden 100 channels starting talking at once you'd need the processing power to encode it, transport it, and decode it. I'm sure there's ways to do it, but in my experience no one was ever happy with the call quality. Also the Analog (because IPC only delivers them as analog) to digital conversion to ingest in your system was garbage and caused all kinds of echo and audio artifacting that the clients hated. Not a single one I dealt with was happy with the IP or digital turret system. The cost savings were enough to make them deal with it though.

What's your end game here? Are you trying to code your own system or something and hope to leverage line Asterisk or FreePBX to break into the lucrative turret or ringdown market?

hummingbird hoedown
Sep 23, 2004


IS THAT A STUPID NEWBIE AVATAR? FUCK NO, YOU'RE GETTING A PENTAR

SKILCRAFT KREW Reppin' Quality Blind Made Products

Jerk McJerkface posted:

What's your end game here? Are you trying to code your own system or something and hope to leverage line Asterisk or FreePBX to break into the lucrative turret or ringdown market?

Kind of. I'm wondering if there would be a market for a cheaper, lighter weight version of this for smaller businesses or industries. A way for offices to have hoot and hollers with each other or simply a nice soft phone that can hold entire company's worth of contacts so they can be called quickly, plus all the nice merging and swapping features that come on turrets. If it could be done off an open-source system, even better.

I have a feeling you're about to shatter my dreams with reality.

Super-NintendoUser
Jan 16, 2004

COWABUNGERDER COMPADRES
Soiled Meat

Hummer Driving human being posted:

Kind of. I'm wondering if there would be a market for a cheaper, lighter weight version of this for smaller businesses or industries. A way for offices to have hoot and hollers with each other or simply a nice soft phone that can hold entire company's worth of contacts so they can be called quickly, plus all the nice merging and swapping features that come on turrets. If it could be done off an open-source system, even better.

I have a feeling you're about to shatter my dreams with reality.

Congratulations you've invented a needlessly complicated intercom system.

You've also stated your goals in a very generic way. Describe exactly what you want to happen. Sell me this idea. Forget the technical details. Assume it all exists and works and I own a company you'd expect to sell to. Why should I replace my CCM with whatever this mess you are selling is.

hummingbird hoedown
Sep 23, 2004


IS THAT A STUPID NEWBIE AVATAR? FUCK NO, YOU'RE GETTING A PENTAR

SKILCRAFT KREW Reppin' Quality Blind Made Products

Jerk McJerkface posted:

Describe exactly what you want to happen. Sell me this idea. Forget the technical details. Assume it all exists and works and I own a company you'd expect to sell to. Why should I replace my CCM with whatever this mess you are selling is.

You're a small or medium-sized business. The product is a soft-phone that has a very similar interface to a trading turret. Pages of contacts, the ability to have more than one handset, the ability to swap or merge active calls, the ability to have a hoot-n-holler between users (maybe two people in the same department at different offices who would benefit from having and always-on connection), the ability to record calls, the ability to stream TV or news within the phone client. All done on IP so there is no investment in analog phone lines or paying for the expenses that go along with them.

Maybe I'm looking at it wrong. Maybe what I have in my mind is more a soft-VOIP phone that shares some features with a turret and not a turret that is all IP-based.

Super-NintendoUser
Jan 16, 2004

COWABUNGERDER COMPADRES
Soiled Meat

Hummer Driving human being posted:

You're a small or medium-sized business. The product is a soft-phone that has a very similar interface to a trading turret. Pages of contacts, the ability to have more than one handset, the ability to swap or merge active calls, the ability to have a hoot-n-holler between users (maybe two people in the same department at different offices who would benefit from having and always-on connection), the ability to record calls, the ability to stream TV or news within the phone client. All done on IP so there is no investment in analog phone lines or paying for the expenses that go along with them.

Maybe I'm looking at it wrong. Maybe what I have in my mind is more a soft-VOIP phone that shares some features with a turret and not a turret that is all IP-based.

All these features you describe are present in most major IP phone systems. Avaya does it, cicso does it. The only bad idea in your lot is the ability to stream TV since I'm already at a PC so why have video streaming in my phone. It's redundant.

hummingbird hoedown
Sep 23, 2004


IS THAT A STUPID NEWBIE AVATAR? FUCK NO, YOU'RE GETTING A PENTAR

SKILCRAFT KREW Reppin' Quality Blind Made Products

Jerk McJerkface posted:

All these features you describe are present in most major IP phone systems. Avaya does it, cicso does it. The only bad idea in your lot is the ability to stream TV since I'm already at a PC so why have video streaming in my phone. It's redundant.

I checked out Cisco and Avaya's soft phones and they look pretty archaic. I'm guessing the phones are relatively cheap while the services provided are very expensive. I'm wondering if there would be a market for this type of thing using open source products like Asterisk with a similar interface to a turret. What would your opinion be after seeing the business from the inside?

And what do you do now?

Partycat
Oct 25, 2004

You would not use the softphone like IP Communicator or Jabber, you'd use something that looked more like one of Arc's attendant consoles, just using the phone to deliver the audio stream. There are 3rd party software packages that you can use to manage the pushbutton comms but you have to mix the audio somewhere, somehow. One to one is not a big deal but the problem here is more like having a many to one whisper that scales to some number of active users. You could replicate this but as Jerk points out, it likely won't be as elegant of a solution.

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Super-NintendoUser
Jan 16, 2004

COWABUNGERDER COMPADRES
Soiled Meat

Hummer Driving human being posted:

I checked out Cisco and Avaya's soft phones and they look pretty archaic. I'm guessing the phones are relatively cheap while the services provided are very expensive. I'm wondering if there would be a market for this type of thing using open source products like Asterisk with a similar interface to a turret. What would your opinion be after seeing the business from the inside?

And what do you do now?

I now design server environments for publication companies. Doing phone system work is probably second only to doing printer maintenance for jobs that make you want to blow your brains out. Phones are awful to manage, install, program, troubleshoot, it was just the worst thing ever. Imagine coming into work one day and having your entire phone system be different, and I'm the guy you call for problems with that.

Real conversation between me and a user (a VP of something or other):

User: Hey, these new phones are garbage. For transferring you have to hit two keys. Why is it more than the old system?

JMJF: Well, you hit "Transfer" then the number you want to transfer too, and then you hit "Transfer" again. You requested attended transfers, if you don't want an attended transfers you can just enter the number and hit transfer once.

User: No, it's two buttons, the old system was one button, how can this be two, it shouldn't be more buttons because it's newer, it should be simpler, it should be less buttons.

JMJF: The old system was one button, how could it transfer with less buttons?

User: Yes, exactly, less buttons, it should be simpler

JMJF: less buttons than one button would be zero buttons, how would it know you wanted to transfer with out you hitting atleast one button

JMJF: !@#$% you, don't be cute with me.



They added a more complicated feature, and wondered why it was more buttons to do. This was my life for years. And I hated it.

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