Considerations for shuffling

Last Updated : Jan 11, 2024 |

This section provides information about shuffling under different circumstances.

  • Audio Shuffling Connections: The audio shuffling may cause a disruption in the media exchange for a duration of approximately 200ms. The disruption may be longer for an inter-network region call or a call traversing multiple switches. For a call involving an H.323 trunk as one of the endpoints, the administered values of the Inter-/Intra-region IP-IP Direct Audio fields on the trunk group associated with that trunk determines the peer PBX’s Media Processor capability to handle shuffling:

    • For a call traversing through multiple switches the shuffling process may continue either leading to a full shuffle or a partial shuffle.

    • For a normal point-to-point call between two IP terminals the process can begin as soon as the terminating end answers the call. The call may undergo direct ip-ip audio connection or TDM connection based on user actions and feature interactions.

  • TTD equipment is not sending or receiving tones accurately: If Teletype for the Deaf (TTD) equipment is to communicate over H.323 trunks, the system administrator should ensure that G.711 codecs are the primary codec choice for those trunks. This will ensure that the TTD tones are accurately sent through the connection.

  • Audio quality degrades: Audio quality may suffer if a call is subjected to a series of compressions of different types (some degradation is observed even if the same codec is used multiple times). If shuffling cannot be invoked, then maximum use of a G.711 codec should be encouraged to deal with multiple codec steps.

  • Switch ends IP audio channel: When an IP-IP direct call disconnects, if any set remains off-hook, the switch sends the appropriate tone as administered by the Station Tone Forward Disconnect field on the Feature-Related System Parameters screen to the off-hook set.

    • If that administered value is not silence, the switch reconnects back the audio path of such sets to a media module, if an audio channel is available in the same network region.

    • If that administered value is silence, the switch ends the IP audio channel

  • User experiences one-way audio as soon as the far end connects: If an endpoint is incapable of shuffling and unable to signal that limitation during registration, but is administered to shuffle, the endpoint user will notice that two-party calls to other IP endpoints that are also capable of shuffling have one-way audio as soon as the far end answers the call. A similar outcome results for calls from such endpoints.

  • Service Observer experiences break in speech path: If a call center agent is active on a two-party IP-IP direct call, and a call center supervisor chooses to service observe into the call, the agent would likely notice the 200ms break in the speech path while the call is being shuffled back to an IP-TDM-IP call. Stations that might be service-observed should be administered to block shuffling.

  • LAN endpoint cannot be administered to allow shuffling: If a LAN endpoint is administered for permanent audio service link operation, the endpoint cannot be administered to shuffle audio connections. Permanent audio service establishes a link that sends a continuous audio stream even when the set is idle and can be used for monitoring.