Charting SIP Server Data

The total number of minutes that have been routed to and from the PSTN by the VoIP User SIP servers since we started in 2003.

In approximate terms, and for the purposes of understanding our community funded PSTN gateway, we generate a little over two outbound call minutes for every inbound call minute.

If you double the figure you see for "inbound" and compare the result to the figure you see for "outbound" you'll see, approximately, how "minute neutral" we are at any given moment. Maintaining this balance is the objective of the software that runs VoIP User, and is something that we always keep a close eye on with the objective of making improvements.

The total number of minutes per month routed outbound from our SIP server to the PSTN for 2006. This graph is updated daily at 7am GMT as doing this one in realtime would put too much load on the server.

It's interesting to watch these figures drop as more and more calls are made SIP to SIP either direct between VoIP User members or via our peering arrangements.

The total number of minutes per month routed inbound to our SIP server from the PSTN in 2006. As above, this graph is updated daily at approximately 7am GMT in order to reduce server load.

When we've previously studied our data we've noticed some interesting patterns which we can use to better understand the geographic make-up collated in our Call Data Records.

We know, for example, by comparing IP addresses of SIP clients logged into our server, that 90% of calls made are local to that users own Country, with the remaining 10% being international (relative to their location).

When we graph these outbound Call Records as below, we can therefore corelate the result directly with the geographic popularity of VoIP for our members.

One of the most interesting statistics has always been Poland (and we understand that Poland also has a substantial Skype user-base).

Equally interesting here is to see some South American countries coming to the fore. South America has an average of just under 15% internet connectivity per capita, with both Argentina and Brazil being very high up on the growth scale.

This pie chart is produced dynamically every 2 hours and shows a "snapshot" of the top 8 user-agents that are logged into our SIP server.

The percentages shown are relative to the top 8, not the entire server. We average about 3,500 users online at any given moment out of (as at April 2006), just under 12,000 "active" subscribers. "Active" here means users that have logged in at least once within the last 2 weeks.

Asterisk has always been the leader, by some margin. The rest tend to be the usual suspects, although we've seen a definite increase in the use of the Fritz Box device in the last 6 months.

There are also lots of very odd, and undisclosed, user-agents out there who do not give any information on themselves when they connect. We like to think that those are developers "experimenting" with new software, as that's one of the main reasons we created VoIP User in the first place - as somewhere to experiment. But we really have no idea.