 Welcome to the network engineering video blog. I am your host Michael Crane in today's video We're going to use wire shark to look at a sip two-way call Where a customer calls customer support and then the support person puts the customer on what I call fake call hold aka mute So this is very common and I tell you how to recognize if you might be on fake call hold And we also look at the sip call trace for a user putting someone on on Fake or on mute basically Not it's not called. It's it's actually mute, right? Very common customer and customer support Circles, so I think you should be aware. So let's get started Okay, so this is gonna be the call mute test. All right and Actually, we're going to call this the fake call hold test because I wanted to show you something that Could happen to you and it probably has happened to you and you may or may not have known it So I'm just going to mention it. So let's say you're a customer, right? And let's say you're calling. Oh, I should have called this customer support instead of operator But we'll just call it the operator for this demo, so We're going to uh, let's do a phone call here at 192 If you've watched my previous videos, you know, I'm doing the direct ip calling because we don't have a pbx yet That'll be in future videos. But anyway, I digress. So the customer is calling customer support All right Yeah, customer support is picking up the phone. Uh, yes, may I help you? and uh the customer is saying Yes, my internet is is down. I need it fixed And the customer support person says Okay Hold one minute, please And instead of putting you on hold He or she hits the mute button All right And as you can tell I can talk it. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello So this the customer you the customer You just hear nothing but dead silence, right? You I'm sure everyone's been put on mute before, right? However The customer support support person I don't know if you can hear the volume, but the customer support person can hear everything you say All right, so if you start saying all that customer support person is a POS and sounds like an idiot and blah blah blah blah blah You being the the customer thinking you're on hold and you're not really on hold Anyway, when that customer support person takes you off fake cold, they're gonna have a whole new attitude towards you So anyway, I just wanted to uh to bring that up because uh I'm sure it is ha it has happened to everyone. I'm almost 100 positive of it And if you're a customer support person and want to chime in and and give us some stories on some of the stuff You've heard people say and let us know All right Okay, so here's our wire shark capture from our fake call hold I wanted to do this for completion. We've looked at call transfer conference calling call hold And I just wanted to show you that as you can see here Uh, there is no sit messages involved With a call hold, right? And I just wanted to show you that so here's I mean, here's the invite the 200 okay. We're in Communication state at that point. Oh, sorry after this acknowledge of the 200 okay And then we chit chatted for about looks like 15 seconds and then hung up, right? So one thing I I I didn't mention when we're Looking at the phones is one way to tell if if you're on fake call hold is If you don't hear any music on hold Then uh, you were probably on fake call hold Okay, or mute So that's one way to tell because most Most pbx systems will not Not that they can't put music on hold when you put someone on mute Um, but they don't and one of the reasons why Is for conference calls So if your pbx played music on hold every time you You put your phone on mute And you know played music on hold to the other the other party then Everyone on the conference call would hear your music on hold it would be very disruptive and you would be hated by many also A pbx can record Both ends actually of the of the conversation If if operator puts you on hold then they they can just redirect the sip stream to a um another server that just records Whatever rtp it can pick up And then it'll it can play music Back to you and and still record what you're saying So, uh, you know, just be careful of that and most people know that but the fake call hold is is real easy to do and it's very common Um with customer support people. So All right, don't forget you can support the network engineering video blog by donation Using a credit card and PayPal or by purchasing products at the muxall store Details and links are in the description under this video Well, that's it for this video If you like the video give it a big thumbs up that helps and hit the subscribe button That really helps if you have any questions or comments post them in the comments under this video Thanks for watching and i'll see you next time