user manual

Cisco Hoot and Holler over IP
Hoot and Holler over IP Overview
VC-827
Cisco IOS Voice, Video, and Fax Configuration Guide
For further information about interactive voice response (IVR), refer to Configuring Interactive Voice
Response for Cisco Access Platforms.
Current Hoot and Holler Implementations
Traditional hoot and holler networks (see Figure 131) are analog, multipoint, four-wire,
audio-conference networks that are always up. When a user wants to communicate, the user pushes a
button and speaks either through a microphone, a hoot phone, a turret, or a squawk box.
Figure 131 Traditional Hoot and Holler Network
Figure 131 illustrates a traditional hoot and holler network. Each remote location is connected to a
central bridge using leased lines. Four-wire connections and N-1 bridges are used to avoid echo
problems.
Hoot and holler networks are typically spread over four to eight sites although financial retail networks
may have hundreds of sites interconnected. Within a site, bridging (mixing voice signals) is done locally
with a standard analog or digital bridge that may be part of a trading turret system. Between sites, there
are two prevalent methods for providing transport:
• Point-to-point leased lines with customer-provided audio bridging at a central site
• Carrier-provided audio bridging
When customers provide their own bridging services with point-to-point leased lines, branch offices in
a metropolitan area commonly have 25 to 50 lines or more.
The second method, carrier-provided audio bridging, is prevalent within the United States but rare for
overseas transport. In this scenario, the audio bridges are located at the carrier's central office and the
four-wire lines are terminated at the client’s site on a local audio-bridge equipped with four-wire
plug-ins, which then feed to local public address (PA) system speakers. Customer-provided hoot
bridging services can now be replaced with a Cisco hoot and holler over IP solution.
Cisco Hoot and Holler over IP Overview
Cisco's VoIP technology, which was initially focused on traditional PBX toll-bypass applications, can be
used to combine hoot and holler networks with data networks. While some customers may have done
some level of hoot and data integration in the late 1980s with time-division multiplexing (TDM), this
form of integration does not allow for the dynamic sharing of bandwidth that is characteristic of VoIP.
Remote
location
Remote
location
Remote
location
Remote
location
Leased lines
4-wire phone or speaker with microphone
Central site
35836
N-1
voice
bridge