How AI is Helping to Improve Call Centers

By: John Shepler

All of us have been frustrated when making calls to customer service… and it seems to be getting worse. High costs and labor shortages serve to dishearten the poor customer hanging on the phone for hours and, also, the companies who desperately need to provide a favorable experience to keep their customers and attract new ones. Tech correspondent David Pogue discusses this situation and possible solutions in this CBS News report:



Did you catch that the likely solution going forward is a combination of traditional call center agents and new artificial intelligence software. The example in the story is called Grace. Here’s a more detailed look at how Grace works as a stand-alone agent:



Of course, even the most advanced AI agents come to a screeching halt when confronted by unique or complex situations. That’s where the best solution is to transfer immediately to a trained human agent. Some of the best agents are located in countries outside the United States and English is not their first language. Many US customers are put off by interacting with an agent with a heavy foreign accent, even though this agent has excellent technical skills. A new AI tool that can help is from a company called Sanas. The software works to change the speaker’s accent without otherwise affecting the conversation. You can try it out online and compare how actual call center agents sound with and without the AI support.

Behind the Scenes
Not all AI tools directly interact with customers. More mundane, yet important, applications include optimizing networks to get the best performance. SD-WAN is a simple system that combines multiple Internet or direct line connections and continuously chooses what traffic to direct down what path. Highly sensitive functions like VoIP phone calls and teleconferences get highest priority on for the lowest latency paths. Less sensitive operations, like remote backups, get lower priority and lesser performing paths.

AI software is also valuable for intelligently routing calls to ensure that they go to the next available person that can properly handle them and to track down key players regardless of whether they are at their desks or on the move.

Do you have communications issues that might be helped with newer or better technical solutions? Things are changing rapidly. Get support and find out what telecom solutions can really benefit your company.

Best Way to Manage Your Phone System: Get Rid of It

By: John Shepler

What is a common denominator for all businesses? Telephones. What’s a common denominator among business phone systems? They need to be managed. Well, what if they didn’t? Would that be a load off your mind and a competitive edge for your business? It certainly could be. Let’s see why. Even more importantly, let’s see how.

The Trouble With Desk Sets
The legacy business phone is a heavy black box full of analog circuitry and connected to the phone company its own telephone “line”. Today, the phones are lighter, some have digital circuitry, others are cordless with multiple handsets. They still have their own unique “telephone” network wiring.

When you have a single phone or a cordless set with several handsets, managing the phone system is no big deal. There’s really nothing to manage. If you’ve got a dial tone, you’re good to make and receive calls. The one thing you might add is a backup battery if the phone has an AC power adaptor. Legacy analog sets get their power right from the phone line. Newer electronic phones, especially the cordless variety, have DC power supplies that plug into the wall.

Management headaches begin when you get a number of phones sharing outside lines. Sure, each phone can have its own outside line, but that gets real expensive real fast. Plus, not everybody is making outside calls at the same time. Some are calling within the company. Many are not on the phone at all.

Types of Business Phone Systems
The two most popular types of business phone systems are Key Telephone Systems (KTS) and Private Branch Exchange (PBX).

Key systems let you call between phones inside the company using only your internal telephone wiring. That’s a big advantage over independent phones because the telephone company will charge you for every call that has to go through their network. The limitation of KTS is that each line has its own button on every phone and has to be manually selected to make or receive calls. That limits the practical number of outside lines to typically 4 or 6.

Private Branch Exchanges are little phone company switches within your business. You can still make internal calls through the PBX without using an outside line. The PBX system manages a pool of outside lines that are shared among all the phones in the system. The number of lines you need depends on what percentage of employees are making or taking calls from outside the company at the same time. A dozen lines can often serve dozens of users.

Why Get Rid of Your Phone System
Someone in the company, and it may be you, is responsible for telephone expenses. These include local and long distance charges, the cost of purchasing and maintaining the phone system, plus moves, adds and changes to your telephone assets.

The cost of “moves, adds and changes” comes from the fact that each phone has a dedicated line that goes to the KTS or PBX. The connection tells the system which phone is picked up or needs to ring. If you want to move a phone to another desk, you have to also move the connection in the phone wiring or reprogram the system so that it knows the new location. Otherwise employees have to change phone numbers every time they are relocated. Add a phone? You’ll need to add a phone jack at that location and a line back to the system.

The larger the company, the more phones there are, the more phone wiring there is to wrangle and the more expensive the phone system becomes. Worse, if your company grows beyond the capacity of your system, you’ll have to upgrade it if possible or rip it out and put in a new one if not. At some point the technology will become obsolete and it will get really pricey or impossible to keep the beast running. Then you are looking at a major capital investment.

How to Get Out of the Phone Business
Whatever business you are in, it is probably not the telephone business. You simply need those phones to get your job done. Even call centers are focused on the services being provided and not the telephone equipment itself.

What if you could just buy or rent the telephone sets as you need them, plug them into your existing computer network and let somebody else worry about buying and maintaining all that expensive switching equipment?

You can with a service called Hosted PBX or Hosted VoIP. Both mean the same thing. VoIP is the technology that turns telephone sets into network peripherals. Like all computers, the phones have their own internal address on the network. They can be plugged into any network jack and will work just fine. No need to change any wiring.

There is no KTS or PBX on your premises. A much larger “Cloud” system is located at the service provider’s data center. All you have on-site are telephone sets called SIP Phones and a special router or call controller to direct phone calls to the provider. You no longer need outside lines to the phone company. Instead, you have a digital SIP Trunk that connects your location to the provider.

The Pay as You Go Advantage
What’s happened is that you have traded a large initial investment in a phone system and the ongoing costs to maintain it and make changes for a simple “cost per seat” for each phone. Some providers include all new SIP phones when you sign up for service. They’ll send more when you expand the business. No need to pay up-front for phones and lines that will sit unused until you need them. If you need to downsize at some point, you return the phones and stop paying for the ones you no longer need.

Advanced Features
Chances are that your existing business phone system doesn’t have the ability to include smartphones or integrate with computers for efficient call center operations. You many not even have the functionality to support auto attendants or hunt groups for multiple agents for your call center. The hosted system will not only have many more advanced features that what you probably have now, but will be kept up to date as new features are offered. You never have to upgrade your phone “system” because the system is provided for you in the cloud.

Are you feeling limited by the functionality, inflexibility or high costs of your current phone system. Before paying a small fortune to upgrade your in-house equipment, take a closer look at Cloud Hosted PBX Business Telephone Service.

Telephone Trunks for Call Centers

By: John Shepler

All businesses need telephone lines of some sort. Independent professionals may rely on a smartphone for wireless communication, but businesses with offices or stores open to the public or with two or more employees almost always have some sort of landline installed. Let’s take a look at the analog and digital options available and the advantage of installing telephone trunk lines to increase capacity and reduce cost.


Plain Old Analog
Analog phone lines are the legacy technology of the phone companies going back over a century. You’ll hear them described as POTS or Plain Old Telephone Service. POTS lines are well established, highly reliable and engineered for high voice quality on both local and toll calls. Standard phones, including desk sets and cordless phones with multiple handsets, are analog phones and plug directly into analog business phone lines.

Broadband Phone
The digital solution for a single phone line is a broadband Internet connection shared with the computers. This option is usually chosen for its low cost, but voice quality can degrade and certain applications, like FAX machines and alarm systems, may not function correctly.

Adding More Lines
What about the vast majority of businesses with more than one phone line, especially those with an in-house contact center or specializing as a call center? Small operations sill rely on analog phone lines. You can add analog lines one at a time and plug them into your key telephone system or PBX switching system. Each outside line has its own phone number.

How Costs Add Up
Adding analog phone lines incrementally as you need them works well until you get more than half a dozen to a dozen separate lines. There are no technical issues, but costs mount up. Two lines cost twice as much as one line. Six lines cost six times as much. There is no economy of scale as these are independent lines.

How Trunking Saves
The strategy for reducing costs while maintaining voice quality and reliability is called trunking. Trunking simply means combining multiple lines to create a single trunk line with the same capacity. Trunking was invented by the telephone industry to transport dozens or even thousands of phone conversations efficiently from switching office to switching office. Originally, this was done with analog technology called carrier telephony. In recent decades, it’s all gone digital from office to office, leaving analog POTS lines only for that last mile connection between the telco office and the customer’s premises.

T1 Telephone Trunks
The first digital trunk line that was introduced by the phone industry for business users was the T1 telephone line. Yes, this is the same T1 technology that you may be using for point to point or dedicated Internet access. The difference is that the T1 line is divided or “channelized” into 24 separate segments or time slots. Each channel can transport one two-way telephone conversation and is the equivalent of an analog POTS line. You can use an appliance called a channel bank to convert between analog phone and the T1 line. Most in-house PBX phone systems have the necessary interface to do this or it can be added easily with a plug-in card.

Cost Advantage of T1
The big advantage of T1 trunks is that they become cost competitive with multiple POTS lines when you get over 6 to 10 outside lines. If you need more than a dozen phone lines for your desks or a call center operation, T1 is the lower cost option. Multiple T1 lines can be added to provide blocks of 24 outside lines incrementally.

ISDN PRI Improves on T1
A newer version of the T1 line is called ISDN PRI or Primary Rate interface. It uses the same T1 line but reserves one channel for signaling and switching. The other 23 channels are available as separate phone lines. ISDN PRI is popular with call centers because it provides faster call setup and teardown than the older T1 telephone lines. It also offers digital data ,such as Caller ID, that is not generally available on just T1 trunks. Like T1, though, multiple ISDN PRI trunks can be installed to provide as many outside lines as needed. Cost is competitive with T1 and most PBX systems come with the PRI interface already installed.

SIP Trunking, The Emerging Standard
While ISDN PRI is now the standard in commercial telephone trunking technology, an even newer technology is available to better support enterprise VoIP telephone systems. This is called SIP trunking. SIP is the switching protocol used by IP telephones and VoIP phone systems.

SIP vs T1
SIP trunks are also digital, but differ from T1 lines in that they are based on packet switching rather than time division channelization. Packet switching is the heart of all Ethernet networks that support computing. What companies are doing is replacing their old analog telephones with IP phones that connect to the same network as the computers. SIP trunks extend this connection out to the service provider for multiple telephone lines or a combination of voice and data.

Private Lines vs The Internet
Note that high performance SIP trunks are private lines between the user and the carrier and do not suffer from the vagaries of Internet broadband phone. SIP trunks often have the ability to also supply Internet service, but the telephone packets have priority to maintain high voice quality. SIP trunking is becoming popular for call center operations as companies replace their old PBX systems with newer IP PBX systems or choose to outsource the switching function to the cloud.

How to Choose
Which type of telephone trunking arrangement is optimum for your organization? Get some expert advice on the tradeoffs and competitive pricing from multiple carriers serving your location. Call now toll free (888) 848-8749 or enter your inquiry at Telexplainer.net

Call Center Contact Center Phone Service

Call centers and contact centers are major users of telephone services, especially long distance and toll free number services. What’s the best option for your call center to ensure that you have the right features and the best pricing? Well, there are several good technical options available right now. Let’s take a closer look at them to see what they can offer.

Traditional telephony has been based on basic business phone service, also called POTS or Plain Old Telephone Service. Old is right. Analog phone lines have been used for over 100 years and are still going strong. They’re highly reliable, deliver clear voice quality and don’t suffer from digital artifacts like latency.

Analog lines were originally intended to be one line per telephone. Key systems allow multiple lines on each phone so you can select which one to answer manually. All the but the smallest call centers have more lines and more agents than a key system can handle. That means using a PBX or Private Branch Exchange to automatically assign lines and direct incoming calls.

What PBX offers is automation. If you only need a half dozen or so outside lines, analog business lines still make economic sense. You connect them to your PBX using FXO (Foreign Exchange Office) ports on interface cards that plug into your PBX system.

When you need more than a half dozen or so outside lines, digital trunk service starts to make sense. Why? It’s because there is a cost advantage to bundling multiple phone lines into one trunk line. You may already have multiple analog lines coming in via a multi-pair binder cable. This is different. A T1 line uses two twisted copper pair to carry 23 or 24 separate phone lines digitally. Yes, those are the same copper pair that would otherwise be used for analog phone service.

The way this works is that the phone conversations are digitized at one end using an analog to digital converter and converted back to analog at the other end using a digital to analog converter. Each call is assigned its own digital timeslot or channel. They are kept separate so that there is no cross-talk between calls. T1 is a synchronous system that has strict timing at both ends of the line. Latency is almost non-existant. However, any unused channels are transmitted empty. All channels are constantly being exchanged between your PBX and your telephone service provider.

Why the choice between 23 and 24 phone conversations on a T1 line? All 24 channels can be used for telephone calls. This is called a T1 telephone line or T1 trunk. The other option is to use 23 channels for conversations and use one channel for switching, signaling and data, such as ANI and Caller ID. That option is called ISDN PRI or T1 PRI. PRI trunks are very popular with call centers because they offer the Caller ID information and faster switching times than normal T1 phone lines. Your PBX system may have multiple PRI ports so that you can have 23, 46, 69 or more outside lines for your call center.

SIP Trunking is an alternative to ISDN PRI. It is based on VoIP technology and uses packets rather than channels. SIP Trunks can be interfaced to older technology PBX systems and the newer IP PBX phone systems. There may be cost advantages for SIP Trunking, especially if using a lower bandwidth CODEC (Coder/Decoder) than the industry standard G.711. Some newer CODECs offer high call quality while transporting more simultaneous calls on the same line bandwidth.

SIP Trunking also opens the opportunity for cloud communications or Hosted PBX. With a hosted system, both the outside lines and the PBX switching system move to the cloud. You have only phones and a VoIP gateway in-house. The advantage to a cloud hosted solution is that you avoid heavy capital investment, pay for service by the agent seat per month, and don’t have to worry about maintenance or upgrades. The service provider takes care of all this for you.

Are you starting up a new call center or contact center, facing an upgrade cycle or expanding operations? If so, this is the perfect time to check business phone service options and prices for call centers and contact centers. You could gain performance advantages at lower prices now.

Office Telephone Service Via Cloud

When you think of office telephone service, the thing that comes to mind is a phone on every desk with an easy 3 or 4 digit number to call other phones in-house and access to an outside line whenever you need one. Today, that picture also includes your own direct dial phone number and personal voice mail. Transfers, call forwarding and conference calls are easy to set up. So, where is the equipment that runs this phone system?

For most people, the answer is “who cares?” The actual phone system could be anywhere. As long as it works all day, every day, the mechanics of how this is accomplished is beyond the interest of all but a few people. The ones who care are the business manager who pays the phone bills, the IT person or people who quietly keep everything humming, and the provider of the service.

That provider could be the local phone company. That’s how it was for at least half of the last century. For many if not most companies, at least part of the system is in-house. This could be a small wireless phone system with a couple of lines and a half-dozen handsets. It could be a key system using desk phones with a separate button for each of 4 to 6 outside lines. It might even be a PBX phone system mounted in a back room with lines coming in from each phone and going out to the telephone company.

Since very few people are all that interested in running their own in-house telephone switching system, why not ditch the whole thing? Does that mean going back to analog phones connected to the local Telco? Not at all. Today it means going forward to a cloud based solution that will give you all the functionality you have now and more.

Cloud communications is the new PBX. It’s also the new key system and the new small office system with only a few telephones. It may even provide your broadband Internet.

The cloud telephone system is more formally known as hosted PBX or hosted VoIP. You already know what hosting is. Chances are that you already buy a hosting solution from one of the many online providers. This could be a shared solution, a virtual private server (VPS) or a dedicated server of your own. The economics of setting up your own data center just to run a web server don’t make sense anymore. There is so much competition in the hosting field that simple solutions are only a few dollars a month. Dedicated servers are only a few hundreds of dollars per month. That includes the box, the bandwidth and the IT services to keep it all running.

Larger companies that run their own customized packages for business information may have elected to just add one more server for the web to the racks they already have in their data centers. It hasn’t made much sense to go out of house for a solution when you need a large data center and staffing to optimize your business. Well, not till recently. Now these major corporations are shutting down their in-house data centers and moving to cloud computing solutions in droves. Why? For the same reasons that make sense to outsource telephone systems. You don’t need to invest in capital and you don’t need a staff to maintain it.

The point is that cloud services have evolved to the point where both your computing and your telephone can be supplied by a cloud vendor at a lower overall cost with more functionality and lower in-house staffing than doing it yourself. There are other advantages, too. You pay for a cloud telephone system per seat per month. You only buy as many seats as you need. When you need more, you order more. There is no need to maintain extra capacity just in case business picks up suddenly. Provisioning of extra resources is fast and easy because the cloud has all the capacity you need.

Now that you have office telephone solutions in the cloud as an option, is there any reason to be stuck with a technical solution that was “modern” decades ago? At the very least, take a look at what’s available in the cloud, what it costs compared to what you are paying now, and if you can get all new phones included with your service.



Note: Original photo of telephone operators courtesy of Seattle Municipal Archives on Wikimedia Commons.

Call Centers Move To the Cloud

Hosted PBX systems are becoming popular alternatives to in-house telephone system upgrades. More and more businesses are discovering the advantages of having their phone switching done in the cloud. So, why aren’t call centers doing the same thing?

In fact, some company contact centers are already well entrenched in the cloud. The smaller or more distributed the contact center, the more it makes sense to make the move from premises to hosted phone system. It’s been harder for the larger call centers to do likewise. Why? Because the phones are only a part of what they need. In addition, call centers need Computer Telephone Integration (CTI) functions to create customer “screen pops” and management monitoring and control software.

The days on on-premises call center systems may be numbered. Cloud based services have become more sophisticated. A decade long pioneer in enterprise VoIP solutions, Smoothstone IP Communications, now offers a system with unlimited scalability and the more advanced functions that call center managers need.

Smoothstone’s ControlMaxx lives in a set of geographically distributed data centers monitored by a 24/7/365 Network Operations Center (NOC) to ensure that the system is up to date and available. Monitoring of Quality of Service (QoS) and security is proactive. The system is based in the cloud, but integrated into your business processes and applications.

The ControlMaxx Call Director allows you to manage your inbound numbers and how they route. You can base this on geography, time of day, holiday schedules, and even in response to disaster recovery plans if trouble strikes your facility. The point is that you have control to adapt call flow patterns on the fly as business conditions dictate.

Call Queuing can be set for agent priority, call distribution, music or message on hold and overflow conditions to better manage your agent staff and minimize caller hold times.

Management can record or monitor calls without disrupting the agent for the purpose of quality assurance, training or compliance. You can record both individuals or call groups and then retrieve them through a simple interface

Call Reporting has the status and analytics you need to manage your call center, including reports by queue, by agent, by call or by path. Combined with recording and monitoring functions, this reporting gives you the tool set you need for efficient call center operation.

The agent can be set up with an Agent Desktop Client, a PC application that gives them access to real-time queue/call statistics and alerts, call status, transfer capabilities and secure chat. The screen pop functionality integrates with your CRM software, such as Salesforce.com.

A combination of cloud based call center technology and high bandwidth low latency connectivity enable you to establish a call center of any size and staff it anywhere it makes sense. That includes existing call center facilities, satellite offices worldwide and part time or full time homeworkers. With communications in the cloud, you have a flexibility to adjust resources beyond what you normally expect.

Do you run a large call center or company contact center that is costing a pretty penny and may have scalability or maintenance issues? Before you go out and raise capital for a big construction project, give cloud based call center solutions a closer look. You might very well get more performance at a lower cost than with what you have now.

Cloud vs Premises Contact Center Costs

Many very small businesses need nothing more than a local or toll free number to take customer calls. Medium and larger companies have a sufficient prospect and customer base that they no longer ask whoever is behind the counter to take the calls. They’ve specialized that function, installed dedicated technology and moved it into its own office space known as a contact center. There’s a certain cost associated with contact centers and it’s hard to reduce... or is it?

Up until recently, the only other option was to outsource the function on or off shore. Offshore contact or “call” centers have developed a tarnished reputation from overly ambitious efforts to recruit agents with weak English language skills and/or inadequate technical or procedural understanding. Companies now promote their in-house expert customer service staff as a competitive advantage.

But what about the costs? Is there any way to make in-house contact centers more competitively priced with shipping the function offshore? Fortunately, the answer is yes.

The way you can attack the cost monster is with a combination of lower capital and operating expenses plus productivity improvements. The tools to do that are the latest technology located in the cloud.

Traditional contact centers are what is known a premises-based. They’re either a department within your building or located in a facility by themselves. The technology is an in-house PBX phone system that manages all the agent phones and all the outside lines. Newer facilities may have an IP PBX phone system, which serves the same function but is easier to interface to computer systems so that agent’s screens can automatically display customer data in a “screen pop.”

PBX and IP PBX equipment is expensive to buy and costly to maintain. As these systems get older, technology passes them by and they don’t have all the latest features. It also gets harder to find replacement parts and even technicians who understand the nuances of that particular piece of equipment. Eventually, in frustration, capital is allocated to purchase a new system and the cycle starts all over.

The new alternative approach is outsourcing, but this time it’s the equipment not the agents. You keep the people you know and trust right where they are. What you unload is the infrastructure that doesn’t add value on its own. It’s just a tool, a means to an end. By using a cloud-based contact center solution all of the clap-trap moves “out there,” while you have the same or much better ability to serve your customers and sales prospects.

inContact is a trail-blazer in the new field of cloud-based contact centers. What they provide is infrastructure very much like cloud computing, except specialized for contact center operations. The core is a much more than a simple hosted PBX system. It performs that function, of course, to connect each agent telephone with a customer. That agent can be sitting at the desk they have now or pick up and move to another area, even be located at home where they join the operation on a part-time or full time basis. This alone gives you a flexibility to employ excellent prospects who can’t or won’t commute to your facility every day.

You probably realize that your current PBX system has a certain capacity. You have so many phones and so many phone lines. As soon as you get one too many callers, the system starts giving busy signals to the overflow. That means lost sales or irritated customers who are going to think twice about doing business with you again. The cloud system has an enormous capacity that you can tap on short notice. Do you have seasonal peaks in your business? No need to have extra capacity idling during the slow periods just so you can handle the rush. The cloud can scale up and down to meet your varying needs throughout the year.

Oh, but is the cloud as reliable as an in-house system? Probably more so. inContact offers a service level agreement of 99.99% availability through dual redundant data centers located in Dallas and Los Angeles. There are six layers of cloud security to ensure that your data stays private. Unlike other cloud service providers, inContact was a telecom carrier before they were a cloud company. That means they can also provide the highly reliable bandwidth you need to connect your agents to the system, with only one provider to deal with.

How much can you save? It varies, of course, but a recent study shows that total cost of ownership can be 30% less for a few as 50 seats and sliced by over 50% for a 500 seat contact center. Is that intriguing enough to get you interested in learning more and getting complete details on prices, cost savings and features? You may be shocked by what you are missing out on.

Ethernet DS3 Bandwidth Comparison

Business bandwidth requirements have been steadily increasing since T1 lines became standard for dedicated Internet access and private point to point connections. If you are a current user of DS3 bandwidth services or considering an upgrade, you’ll be interested in how your various WAN bandwidth options compare.

The traditional high bandwidth network connection is DS3, a 45 Mbps service. This is also the speed of a T3 line. Today, most DS3 services are provisioned over fiber optic cables with a copper handoff at the demarcation point. In some cases, you can get DS3 brought in over coaxial copper or wireless transport.

DS3 is popular for dedicated Internet access in larger organizations, video transport, links to offsite backup and storage and smaller ISPs. DS3 telephony bundles hundreds of outside phone lines for large companies and call centers.

The competitor to DS3 is Carrier Ethernet, especially Metro Ethernet in larger cities. Ethernet services offer standardized speeds of 10, 100 and 1000 Mbps to match the common LAN speeds. But most Ethernet providers also offer other increments in 1, 5 or 10 Mbps steps. A 50 Mbps Ethernet service provides similar bandwidth to DS3.

So how do you choose one service over another? If you need the channelization of traditional TDM services for telephony or other applications, DS3 already meets this standard. It is easily multiplexed and demultiplexed to interface with T1 lines on the low end to OCx SONET fiber optic services on the high end.

Most networking applications are now packet based and more easily interfaced to Ethernet WAN services than legacy telco standards. But since the interface circuitry is generally an off the shelf router module, it may not matter all that much. If you go with a managed router, the service provider will take care of providing the proper customer premises equipment and monitoring the line and interfaces for proper operation.

To muddy the waters a bit more, fractional DS3 services are available that offer less than 45 Mbps for a lower monthly lease cost. You can often get the bandwidth you need by bonding T1 lines together to create increments of 1.5 Mbps up to around 10 or 12 Mbps bandwidth. Or you can get fractional DS3 bandwidth at the speeds where T1 bonding becomes impractical. On the Ethernet side, you can specify nearly any bandwidth from 1 Mbps up to 10 Gbps and often upgrade to higher levels with just a phone call to your service provider.

The fact is that DS3 and Ethernet bandwidths compare favorably. Which you choose for your particular application will most often be determined by which service offers the best pricing for your particular business location. How can you find that out? The easiest way is to check DS3 and Ethernet prices and availability using the GeoQuote online search tool.

PBX Telephone Connection Services

PBX or Private Branch Exchange telephone systems are ubiquitous in medium and larger businesses, call centers, customer contact centers and any business with lots of telephones. The PBX really has two jobs. One is to manage all the phones in the organization for internal calls. The other is to manage all the outside phone lines so that they are shared efficiently among all users. What you want is the right number and type of lines to conduct business efficiently at the least cost.

There are multiple types of lines and also several technologies to consider. You can choose from local or long distance service, incoming or outgoing or bidirectional, and toll free line services. But you can also choose the connection technology. These include analog, switched circuit digital, and IP-based digital.

Analog telephone service has been the mainstay of telephony for over a century. It’s so mature and familiar that it’s known in the industry as POTS or Plain Old Telephone Service. POTS connects by a single copper twisted pair directly from your location to the telco central office. It uses a combination of DC and AC voltages to give you dial tone, rotary and touch-tone dialing, full duplex conversations, and on-off hook signaling. POTS also supports Caller ID.

One POTS line supports one telephone conversation, but it can support more than one telephone set. A very common arrangement is 2 to 4 POTS lines connected to a 2 or 4 line business phone. Multiple phones can make use of these lines, but you need to look for a line-in-use light to know if a phone line is free for your use. When you expand to 4 to 8 lines, you’ll probably install a key telephone system that allows the various phone sets to communicate internally without using an outside line. This system still uses indicator lights to show which lines are in use. You have to manually select an available line to make a call.

PBX systems are computer-based telephone controllers that take over the job of managing outside phone lines. You can connect as many POTS lines as you need to the PBX. When someone requests an outside line by dialing “9”, the system will use the next available line. Users don’t have to worry about selecting lines themselves.

PBX systems also offer a way to reduce your telephone service costs by using digital trunking services instead of POTS. You need 6 to 12 outside lines at a minimum for this to be cost effective. Instead of installing a dozen POTS lines to your PBX system, you plug in a single T1 telephone line that supports up to two dozen phone lines on a single “trunk” line.

The most popular switched-circuit telephone trunk that replaces multiple POTS lines is called ISDN PRI. ISDN is a digital telephony standard, PRI stands for Primary Rate Interface. This service is delivered over a T1 line, so it is also called T1 PRI. What you get is up to 23 outside lines that you can specify to be incoming, outgoing, local, long distance, etc. There is also a signaling and data channel that provides rapid connections and Caller ID services for each line.

A recently developed service called SIP Trunking is based on IP networks used for converged voice and data services. A SIP Trunk can carry both broadband Internet and VoIP telephone services between your location and your service provider. SIP trunks may have a cost advantage, especially if you can use a single T1 line for both voice and data.

Interestingly, both traditional PBX systems and the newer IP PBX systems can connect to POTS, ISDN PRI or SIP Trunks. You need the appropriate interface card, of course, but many systems offer multiple interfaces built-in. If you need more lines, you add one or more additional interface cards.

With all these options, what is the most cost effective solution for your business telephone needs? The best solution will be based on your specific usage patterns and the latest offers from multiple competitive carriers. That’s too much information to digest by simply shopping around. A better way is to use a combination of an automated search process and expert consultants. Both are available for your use at no cost at T1 Rex. Use the online GeoQuote (tm) or call the toll free number for immediate service, and see how much you can save compared to what your phone services currently cost.

T1 Telephony Has Many Flavors

T1 telephony was originally invented to transfer hundreds and thousands of phone calls between telephone company central offices. It’s grown far beyond that initial vision to become the digital phone line of choice for thousands upon thousands of businesses. You may already have or be thinking about installing a T1 phone trunk for your business. But are you aware that you have many options to consider?

T1 is a digital line standard that can be used for voice, data, video or all of these. In its original form, it transports 24 separate phone calls on individual channels called DS0. The combination of these is the T1 line or DS1. Each of the DS0 channels is responsible for transmitting digitized voice, plus call control and signaling.

Today’s T1 voice circuit of choice is called a T1 PRI or ISDN PRI. It’s is still organized as 24 channels on a single digital phone trunk, but one of the channels is used exclusively for call control and signaling, leaving the other 23 channels as the equivalent of 23 separate phone lines. The signaling channel is also used to support data services such as Caller ID.

T1 PRI is popular with businesses that have their own PBX telephone systems and with telephone intensive operations, such as customer contact centers and call centers. Nearly all PBX equipment supports this line format. If more than 23 outside lines are needed, then additional T1 PRI lines can be installed.

There’s a T1 telephony solution designed especially for smaller companies that can’t fathom needing 23 phone lines. Integrated T1 lets you have up to a dozen outside phone lines and uses the rest of the T1 line capacity for broadband Internet service. If you get what’s called a dynamic T1, it will automatically assign any bandwidth not currently being used for phone calls into the broadband pool. This is a very efficient use of resources and can be less expensive than having a dozen separate phone lines plus an independent broadband service.

VoIP has become a popular form of telephone service. An Internet connected T1 line can provide the bandwidth and reliability to support VoIP phone services for a dozen or more simultaneous calls.

T1 PRI lines will also interface with IP PBX systems, the VoIP equivalent of the PBX telephone system. T1 PRI is known for its high voice quality, reliability and support of telephony features such as Direct Inward Dialing.

There is also a new form of T1 telephony called SIP trunking. SIP is the signaling standard used in VoIP phone systems. A SIP trunk is often implemented on a T1 data line, but it is not connected to the Internet. It is a direct point to point connection between your business location and your service provider. This avoids the vagaries of Internet performance and helps the service provider ensure high voice quality and service reliability.

Are you ready for T1 telephony or interested in comparing lower cost options for the service you already have? If so, then check T1 telephony prices and options now.

Reducing Call Center Costs

Call center owners and managers would love to find some way to reduce costs without reducing quality of service. This is especially important as on-shore call centers become popular for premium value customer service. Labor costs may increase with domestic personnel, but is there any way to offset these? You bet there is.

Facilities and personnel are only part of the expense in running a call center, regardless of where it is sited. A big recurring cost is telecommunications services. The larger the center, the bigger the lines coming into and leaving the facility. Pennies per minute on the phone soon become thousands of dollars and tens of thousands of dollars per month. Add to this the cost of data lines and you've got a major line item expense.

The fastest and easiest way to reduce call center costs is simply to pay less for the same quality of service. Is that even possible? It is when you optimize the value of your voice and data telecom line services. You may be lulled into thinking that you are already getting the best rates possible based on your usage volume. But are you?

Unless you've recently gone out for quotes from half a dozen to a dozen competitive service providers you may well be paying more than you have to. I'm not talking about trading down to a lower quality of service. I'm suggesting that there are high quality competitive carriers out there who are hungry for your business, especially in this economic environment. But you have to have a way to find out about them and work out the contract details.

Suffice it to say that simply signing with the incumbent local telephone company does not guarantee you the best competitive rate. If anything, they may treat your business as a captive market and offer limited if any discounts. You may well get incrementally lower rates on voice minutes as your call volume increases. But when was the last time they sat a contract on your desk that was half the cost of the last one? Ha!

So where do you find these alternate carriers and how much time and effort is that going to take? It could be a major project, or it might be a trivial effort. It all depends on how you go about it. The easy path is to work through a telecom services broker who has the tools, personnel and expertise in place to efficiently run a search specifically for your needs and location. Location is important as most carriers have limited service footprints and line prices are calculated from carrier offices to specific business locations.

The task of doing this is made easier by automated tools, such as GeoQuote (tm) from Telarus, Inc. This patented software system has been optimized to interface directly with carrier databases and develop optimum pricing, often in real time. You can give it a try yourself by simply entering some basic telephone and business address information into the GeoQuote online search form. You'll be well advised to also speak with a Telarus consultant, as they have access to special limited time offers not accessible by the search engine. You can request this through the form or call the toll free number and discuss options with a consultant at any time.

Why, Oh Why, PRI?

You may be familiar with the terms PRI, T1 PRI, Telephone PRI, PRI Trunk or ISDN PRI. But what do they mean and why would you select this type of service?

PRI stands for Primary Rate Interface. It's a part of the ISDN or Integrated Services Digital Network and the big brother of BRI or Basic Rate Interface. In simple terms, PRI is a digital trunk line that connects to your PBX telephone system. It combines multiple phone lines into a single digital line. More importantly, it can save you money on your monthly phone expenses.

All these terms: PRI, T1 PRI, Telephone PRI, PRI Trunk and ISDN PRI really mean the same thing. You'll most often hear of T1 PRI and ISDN PRI. The T1 part refers to a T1 line, which is a digital communications line that can carry voice, data, or video. T1 lines can be organized differently to support different applications. The ISDN PRI service is one of those. It has a very specific protocol.

PRI is organized in a format called 23 B + D. Looks a little like a math problem, doesn't it. Actually, it's just shorthand for 23 B or bearer channels and 1 D for delta or data channel. The T1 line is split into 24 equal size channels of 64 Kbps each for a total of about 1.5 Mbps total bandwidth. It's full duplex, so you get the same bandwidth in both directions.

Why carve up the line capacity into 64 Kbps chunks? That happens to be exactly the size required to transport one digitized telephone call using PCM or Pulse Code Modulation, the telephone company standard. It actually breaks down into and 8 bit digitized sample x 8,000 bits per second. The entire switched telephone network is organized around these channels, designated as DS0. They are carefully synchronized so that one call will not bleed into another.

Now, with 23 bearer channels, each "bearing" a single telephone call, you can get the equivalent of 23 separate telephone lines on one T1 PRI line. The remaining channel, the D channel, is used for call control and data. This is how the PBX system and the telephone service provider exchange information know when a call is coming in, when a line is being requested, what number is dialed, and the extent of any auxiliary information such as Caller ID.

Fortunately, you don't need to dig in any deeper than this to be able to put PRI to work in your business. You order your PRI service with so many incoming and outgoing phone lines, local and/or long distance. There a lot of customization you can do with this. Then it's a matter of plugging your T1 PRI line from the telco demarcation point (usually in a back room) into the socket on the PBX circuit card designed to accept PRI service. There can be more than one PRI interface on larger systems. Each line will deliver 23 outside phone lines.

Who uses PRI? Medium and larger size businesses, or even smaller businesses that are telephone-intensive. Sales offices, customer support, call centers of all sizes, and corporate headquarters all use PRI phone service. Why do they use it? Because it connects and disconnects telephone calls faster than the older T1 phone line service, it consolidates many analog lines into one or a few digital lines, it offers exceptional voice quality and reliability, and it's cheaper. Any business that uses 10 or more analog phone lines can potentially save money by switching to PRI service. The more lines you have, the larger the savings.

Is PRI right for your business situation? There's an easy way to find out. Use our real-time quote engine to get instant online pricing for your business location. No cost or obligation for this service.

DS3 Services Proliferate

A demand for ever increasing bandwidth by business users has lead to a proliferation of faster voice and data carrier services. Where once you were lucky to get a T1 line, now you may be faced with a choice of DSx over copper, fiber optic drops, wireless broadband and even point to point laser beams.

DS3 is enjoying a rising popularity as companies saturate their T1 connections and look to move from the DS1 level of 1.5 Mbps to DS3 at 45 Mbps. This wider bandwidth serves a larger user base for dedicated Internet. It also supports telephone services for larger call centers. Video, especially high definition video feeds and video conferences, demand more Mbps even in compressed formats. Other imaging transmission, including teleradiology, benefit from higher speeds for faster transfers.

So, what can an IT manager expect in the business bandwidth marketplace today? First and foremost is dramatic price reductions compared to even a few years ago. Telecommunications transport has become fiercely competitive as new carriers look to penetrate territories traditionally dominated by incumbent telephone companies.

This phenomena has also expanded the range of last mile delivery options. Where DS3 was originally carried over coaxial T3 copper lines, it is now primarily a fiber optic service. DS3 was designed as part of the T-Carrier structure that neatly multiplexes onto SONET fiber optic services such as OC3, OC12 and OC48. Within larger metro areas and colocation facilities, fiber based DS3 is readily available and very affordable. This is especially true for buildings already lit for fiber optic service.

Wireless business broadband services, such as those offered by Nextlink, use microwave spectrum to transport T1, DS3 and even OC3 services from the carrier's point of presence to your business location. Line of sight transmission is usually a requirement, but dropping lines from overhead poles or underground conduits is avoided. For much shorter hops, free space optics from providers such as Terabeam can deliver high bandwidths using infrared laser beams.

While DS3 is defined as a TDM rather than packet based technology, protocol conversions make it relatively easy to transport IP services such as dedicated Internet. Ethernet over DS3 is a newer offering that makes network management even easier. With Ethernet over DS3, your LAN is effectively extended across town, across the country or even internationally.

While DS3 services are more available in heavily populated areas, fractional DS3 can be provided in many more locations by bonding T1 lines together. This gives you 2x, 4x, 8x, and even more multiples of T1 bandwidth in a single large data pipe.

Is your business in need of the bandwidth that DS3 services can provide? Do a quick online check for DS3 services for your location. Be sure to let our team of experts consult on your requirements. They have many more options available than what you see in the instant results.

SIP vs PRI Telephone Trunking

Telephone trunking is the means of transporting multiple telephone conversations across metro or long distances on a single line. The first approach to this used analog frequency division multiplexing in an approach known as carrier telephony. The noise and crosstalk associated with carrier telephony has long since been replaced by digital trunk lines using time division multiplexing techniques. But now TDM trunk lines are being challenged by an even newer technology called SIP trunking.

The impetus for SIP trunking is the move from the traditional circuit switched telephone world to packet switching. In other words, the traditional PBX system is giving way to the iPBX or VoIP telephone system. Does that mean that T1 telephone lines are yesterday's news? Not by a long shot.

The dirty little secret is that just about all business telephone systems with more than half a dozen phone lines are using T1 trunk lines or their big brother, the T3 line or DS3 connection. That includes the latest IP PBX systems, even those that are connected to their phone service providers via SIP trunking. The reason is simple. T1 lines are the most universally available and cost effective carriers commonly available.

The real discussion is what format T1 line to employ. Business office PBX systems and call centers usually want a variant known as T1 PRI. The PRI stands for Primary Rate Interface, a term that comes from a set of telecommunication standards called ISDN or Integrated Services Digital Network. What PRI adds to a standard channelized T1 line is a dedicated signaling channel that makes call setup and teardown faster, plus the ability to provide Caller ID and ANI (Automatic Number Identification.) A T1 PRI line gives you 23 channels that can each carry one telephone call plus the data or signaling channel. If you need more phone lines, simply add another T1 PRI line to your system. If you need a lot more phone lines, say more than 4 or 5 T1 PRI lines worth, you may find it more cost effective to upgrade to a T3 line or DS3 service on fiber optic carrier.

SIP trunking also uses a T1 line, but one configured differently than a T1 PRI line. In this case, channelization is unnecessary because the phone conversations are assigned to packets, not channels. SIP or Session Initiation Protocol is a switching system used for IP telephony, also known as VoIP. SIP is becoming more popular, supplanting other switching protocols in VoIP phone systems.

Both T1 PRI and SIP trunks connect between your phone system and your telephone service provider. Which you select depends on your system's capabilities and the provider that terminates your calls to the PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network. It is not necessarily true that a new VoIP phone system will automatically use a SIP trunk for service. In fact, many IP PBX systems are ordered with T1 PRI interface cards because the best service deal may well be from a competitive supplier providing PRI local and/or long distance telephone service.

Not sure what to order or if you are getting the best possible deal from your current service provider? Let our expert consultants help you get the best lease rates on the most cost effective voice and/or data services for your business needs.