Sangoma NetBorder Call Progress Detection and Why It's End-of-Life

For years the highest-accuracy detection option you could bolt onto VICIdial was the Sangoma NetBorder Call Analyzer, also known by its ParaXip name. It delivered call progress detection (CPD (call progress detection)) well beyond what the built-in tools managed. It is worth understanding even now, because Sangoma retired the product and it is end-of-life. This is the background, kept for reference rather than as a buying recommendation.

What it was

Sangoma CPD was a proprietary engine that classified answering machines, fax machines, and pre-answer call progress on outbound calls. It claimed up to roughly 95% accuracy with very fast detection of humans versus machines, a level the standard answering machine detection (AMD (answering machine detection)) application in Asterisk could not reach. It was a paid, licensed product, and the VICIdial Group acted as an authorized reseller that could install and configure it.

Setup was not trivial. A system administrator had to install the CPD software and patch Asterisk for compatibility. Systems built from a ViciBox image already carried that patch, which made the engine easier to drop in.

The appeal was speed paired with accuracy. The built-in AMD application has to listen to several seconds of greeting audio before it commits to a verdict, which adds latency to every call and still produces mistakes on noisy lines. Sangoma's engine claimed to reach a confident answer faster and more often, which mattered most on high-volume predictive campaigns where a half-second of saved analysis time per call adds up across thousands of dials.

How it fit into the call path

Sangoma CPD ran as a SIP (SIP (Session Initiation Protocol)) proxy server. Outbound calls passed through it, it analyzed the audio, and it returned a classification VICIdial could act on. Because it sat inline as a proxy, it worked best on a separate machine from the VICIdial install, and for scaling it was best to limit one CPD server to about 200 concurrent outbound calls on a single quad-core CPU.

sequenceDiagram
  participant V as VICIdial
  participant S as Sangoma CPD Proxy
  participant C as Carrier
  V->>S: Place outbound call
  S->>C: Forward call via SIP
  C-->>S: Call answered audio
  S->>S: Analyze human or machine or tone
  S-->>V: Return classification
  V->>V: Apply CPD AMD Action

How you turned it on

Once the engine was running, you activated it per campaign with the CPD AMD Action option on the Campaign Detail screen. Setting it to DISPO dispositioned a detected call as AA for an answering machine or AFAX for a fax and hung it up if the call had not yet reached an agent. Setting it to MESSAGE sent the call to the campaign's Answering Machine Message. The routing decision lived in VICIdial; the classification came from Sangoma.

Why it is end-of-life

As of June 30th, 2017, Sangoma set the CPD product as end-of-life, meaning it is no longer available for sale. The VICIdial integration remains documented for archival purposes, but you cannot buy a new license. If you are standing up a campaign today, this is history, not a path forward.

The practical takeaway is to plan around what you can still obtain. The built-in AMD application is free and works well when tuned, and other gateway engines exist for teams that need detection of the kind Sangoma offered. Whatever you choose, the routing settings on the campaign screen behave the same way, so the work you put into your Disposition and routing strategy carries over.

For the broader detection picture, read our AMD and CPD complete guide, and for the specific capabilities Sangoma had that Asterisk lacks see what Sangoma CPD detected.

Need high-quality detection without chasing a discontinued license? VICIfast configures and maintains the detection stack for you. See VICIfast pricing to learn more.