Can CPaaS Make Your Job Easier?

Are you getting a bit overwhelmed with a myriad of business applications that kinda, sorta work together but just don’t seem to give you the seamless communications that you really wish you had? Perhaps something new could help. It’s called CPaaS or Communications Platform as a Service.

What is CPaaS and Why Should I Want It?
CPaaS doesn’t replace what you have now. It extends your capabilities without having to rip out your current systems or buy new expensive hardware. CPaaS is focused on communications. It a suite of tools that plug into your existing systems to add capabilities you don’t have now or find awkward to use. Best of all, you don’t need extensive technical support to make CPaaS work. These are developer friendly APIs hosted in the cloud and available as needed.

What Can CPaaS Do?
Which API’s you elect to use may depend on the industry you are in. For instance, in healthcare you may want the ability to have video consultations for Telehealth, send appointment reminders and have secure HIPAA-compliant messaging. Financial businesses may desire 2FA authentication for secure login and chatbots to handle FAQs. Other businesses may want interactive telephone response, email updates, SMS alerts, virtual meetings and contact analytics.

Note that all of these applications are related to enchanting communications with customers, clients, supplies or team members. They are designed to fit into what you are using now without a lot of muss and fuss. You can customize your workflows and automate interactions without having to purchase, install and train on whole new systems.

The Cloud Makes It Painless
The mere thought of having to take the time and effort to dig into the systems you use every day or hire the expertise needed to do this is cringeworthy. It’s way more complexity than most companies want to deal with. Plus, once you start creating ad-hoc custom solutions, you are stuck with ongoing maintenance and upgrades and tracking who has what throughout the company.

The cloud aspect of CPaaS greatly simplifies things. All the hardware and software that makes the internals of these application interfaces function is handled by the CPaaS vendor. You are just dealing with inserting the APIs and easily customizing the user features as you desire. There are low code and no code solutions including pre-built templates to make it easy on your tech team.

What’s the Cost of CPaaS?
As a service, CPaaS is available on a pay-as-you-go basis. You decide what apps you want to deploy and to what extent. You only pay for what you use. As business conditions change, you can increase or decrease your usage as needed. There is no need for an upfront capital outlay in hardware or software.

Does Communications Platform as a Service sound like it might be something that would make your business more productive? If so, you are invited to talk with a technical expert and see what CPaaS offerings make the most sense for your situation.

The Cloud Offers Communications as a Service

By: John Shepler

The migration of everything to the cloud has coined a new phrase: “as a service”. This implies the business model of pay-as-you-go rather than owning vast capital equipment and software resources and the support staffs that go with them. You still need in-house support for your staff and to liaise with your cloud service provider, but you no longer have to be involved in all the nuts-and-bolts that make the system work.

In addition to the backroom business software humming along in the background, the cloud now offers to take on your electronic communications with the idea of offering a more features for less cost that you’d likely have if you tried to run everything in-house. The name of this new opportunity? Why, Communications as a Service, of course.

Two Flavors of Communications as a Service
If you think of communications as “the telephone”, you are partially right. The landline phone has been the mainstay of business for over a century. It has been joined by the FAX machine to send documents over those same phone lines and the mobile phone that frees us from the wires. The marriage between phones and computers has expanded options to include instant messaging, audio, video and web conferencing, texting, file sharing, call routing and recording, call analytics and integration with business applications like CRM and project management software.

Communications as a Service or CaaS splits off into Unified Communications as a Service or UCaaS and Contact Center as a Service or CCaaS. What’s the difference? UCaaS is intended for use within the company for team collaboration CCaaS is for communicating with customers. You can think of UCaaS as replacing the old PBX business phone system and CCaaS as a technical upgrade to the old call center phone system.

How Unified Communications as a Service Works
With UCaaS the PBX in the closet down the hall or the key telephone set on your desk is gone. If you have a desk phone it connects to your LAN using VoIP rather than its own proprietary phone network. Your new phone system is in the cloud. Since much of your business software is also in the cloud, that makes it easy to integrate traditional phone applications and traditional business software applications.

Phone, or shall we say voice, features including call recording, call forwarding, call routing, teleconferencing, Inclusion of smartphones into the company phone system, and inclusion of work-from-home employees into the company phone system.

But that’s just the start of what can be done. The unification of voice, video and devices means that you are interconnected wherever you are and whatever device you are working from. You don’t have to be near your desk to make or receive calls and you can share documents or collaborate on applications as well as have conversations.

Expanding into Contact Center as a Service
UCaaS is great for interconnecting everyone within a company. Wouldn’t it be great if you could also include customers? That’s been the function of the call center, now renamed contact center. CCaaS supports incoming customer service and outgoing customer marketing.

You still get as many phone sets as you need, but they’re on the network connected to the cloud and not a room full of equipment down the hall. Instead of buying and maintaining all that equipment, you subscribe to the CCaaS system. You’ll get automated outbound dialing, interactive voice response for customer self-service, automatic contact distribution, analytics and other features that have traditionally been part of call center operations.

In addition, CCaaS is omnichannel in that is can communicate with your customers through voice, SMS, video, web sites and social media. Chatbots and virtual agents can handle routine inquiries so that your employees can concentrate on the more difficult issues.

Benefits of Service in the Cloud
With cloud communications as a service, you no longer have to budget large capital outlays for massive amounts of equipment only to have to replace that same equipment years down the road. You are not bothered with having to install constant fixes and upgrades or scheduling time for a vendor to come and service your system. It’s all being done invisibly within the cloud operation. You get the latest features all kept up to date and with enough hardware to run everything. You simply subscribe for as much service as you need when you need it. As your business grows, your cloud service can expand as needed.

You have a choice in how you connect to the cloud. Some companies, especially smaller ones, simply use an Internet service with Direct Internet Access or SD WAN as the most reliable options. For even better performance and reliability a private line direct cloud connection makes the cloud seem part of your facility… as it should.

Are you ready to move up from an antiquated phone system to UCaaS or CCaaS? Talk with a technology expert and find out the features and prices of a system just right for your organization.

Helping Your Business Achieve Hyperconnectivity

By: John Shepler

It took a generation to achieve worldwide Internet connectivity. Now, hold on. We’re going into hyperconnectivity almost immediately.

It’s Everything, Everywhere, All The Time
Hyperconnectivity is the idea that anyone and anything that can be connected will be connected on an always-available basis. We’ve made the jump from logging-in to always-on broadband for our computers and mobile device. The next step is to let the machines chatter among themselves even while we take ourselves out of the loop. You’ll no longer have to access devices. They’ll access each other and you, as needed.

It’s Already Started
We’re starting to experience some of this with connected thermostats, security cams, remote controlled lighting and so on around the home. Business use will be even more insidious. As management sees how much productivity is improved by machines and applications coordinating their actions, the pressure to get more and more connected functions is going to ramp up exponentially. As the human in the loop, your activities will be enhanced by augmented and virtual reality, artificially intelligent agents, and real-time delivery of everything you need to know. No longer will there be a gulf between office and factory, company and suppliers or business and customers. It will all be one big loop.

Are You Ready For This?
If you’ve found it a challenge to get everyone in the company online or transition business applications to the cloud, you “ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” The highest reliability connections, low latency for real time interactions, accommodation for hundreds or thousands of new interfaces, and bullet-proof security to keep out those who would do you ill is becoming a de-facto requirement.

How’s your network doing? Have you broken out in a cold sweat yet or just developed some anxiety about the challenges on their way? No need to face this alone. There is expert help that is up to speed and ready to roll right now. Take a couple of minutes to watch this:


It’s Time… NOW!
If you are seeing even the leading edge of the technology tsunami coming for your business, there is no time to waste. We have the expertise, staffing and experience to make your enterprise network hyper-ready and the tools and applications to give you an immediate productivity improvement. Don’t wait. Get the Telarus team on-board now and you’ll have the support you need to meet the challenge.

Text Messaging To The Stars

When you think of text messaging to the stars, you may fantasize about exchanging messages with Hollywood celebrities. Here’s an opportunity that goes farther. Oh, it goes much, much farther. Actually, 20 light years farther.

You. Yes, you, genuine member of humanity, can be part of a grand text broadcast to another planet. It’s called “Hello From Earth. Send a message to the nearest Earth-like planet outside of our Solar System.” All you have to do is visit the Hello From Earth Website and enter your text message (registration now closed) to the great beyond. In about 20 years it will arrive at the planet Gliese 581d in the constellation Libra, where surprised and delighted ETs will have their little hearts warmed by your message of greeting and affection.

That’s assuming they have little hearts. They may not be so little and they may not have hearts at all. Truth is, we have no idea who we might be cosmo-tweeting or what their reaction might be. Most people figure they can’t go wrong with messages of peace. Some have even invited anonymous aliens to visit our fair planet, even their house.

Not me. I grew up on “The Outer Limits”, “Twilight Zone” and “Science Fiction Theater.” These predated the “Alien” series of movies, but offered similar cautionary tales. Sure, you might be trolling to get some really weird additions to your Facebook friends. But what if all you’re really doing is awaking some sleeping giants? Worse, what if they are bored with their usual cuisine and on the lookout for a new place to dine? That’s why the message I’m sending is:

“Don't even think about eating us. We taste terrible and are poisonous to extra terrestrial life forms.”

Laugh it off if you like, but just remember “To Serve Man” turned out to be a cookbook. If that makes no sense, Google it and learn the shocking truth.

Now that you’ve been warned, take a few minutes to think up something appropriate to message the citizens of Gliese 581d. I’ll bet they have a better name than that for their planet. They probably have us listed as Zorkzik 9267k. Won’t it be a hoot if we both call our planets Earth?

So, who’s behind this Interplanetary Internet communications project? It’s none other than COSMOS magazine. They think it is a cool way to promote National Science Week in Australia and the International Year of Astronomy. At the end of Science Week, NASA is going to transmit all the messages they’ve accepted via the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex in Tidbinbilla.

Then all you have to do is wait about 40 years (20 to get there and 20 back) to see what Gliese 581d has to say. My guess is that once they know we’re here we’ll start getting a flood of intergalactic spam. Unless, of course, their bodies are actually made out of Spam. Then who’s going out for dinner?

TW Telecom's Extensive Service Portfolio

tw telecom is the type of communications provider that's meant by the term "full service." They own and operate a nationwide fiber optic network serving 75 metropolitan markets and over 8,800 commercial buildings. Their network spans more than 26,000 route miles and features a 10 Gbps IP backbone. Need a good price on a T1 line? They've got it. Need long haul Carrier Ethernet service from 2 Mbps to 10 Gbps? They've got that too. Plus just about everything in-between.

If the name tw telecom has a familiar ring, it may come from the company's legacy. The initials "tw" started out meaning Time Warner. That's right. tw telecom (yes, the company name is all lower case letters) started out in 1993 as a joint venture with Time Warner Cable. Later they split from the cable operation and became Time Warner Telecom, LLC. Just this July, they became tw telecom as a publicly traded company. Xspedius, another familiar telecom name in the corporate world, became part of what's now tw telecom in 2006.

tw telecom is the kind of provider you can't outgrow. You may start out with a single T1 data line to get your small business connected. By the time you're a major corporation, you'll have stepped up to dedicated services such as DS3, OC3, wavelength services, private transport SONET rings, and Carrier Ethernet.

Perhaps the newest and most innovative service in business telecommunications is Carrier Ethernet. Often called Metro Ethernet, this is Ethernet that connects multiple locations as if they were on a single company network. tw telecom calls their service Native LAN. With it, you plug into the familiar IEEE Standard 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and 1000 Mbps Ethernet interfaces. It offers the advantage of a familiar technology and often a lower cost per Mbps than legacy transport solutions.

tw telecom offers both voice and data connections, plus an integrated solution that combines local and long distance telephone plus Internet service onto a single dedicated clear channel T-1 line. This service, called VersiPak, dynamically allocates bandwidth so that when voice channels are not being used, that bandwidth is automatically assigned to the Internet service. This is as popular service for smaller and medium size businesses.

tw telecom is part of the suite of carrier services available for instant online quotations through GeoQuote (tm) from Telarus. You can quickly determine the cost savings for your company with a simple entry into the GeoQuote (tm) voice and data pricing form that you'll find at T1 Rex.

I'm Sorry, Dave. I Can't Let You Use That Channel

After the high dollar feeding frenzy of the last spectrum auction, you might have the impression that all the good frequencies are spoken for. From DC to light, there isn't a spare kHz to squeeze in one more carrier. Or is there?

If you call the FCC office and tell them you want to start a new radio-based service and then ask what band of frequencies they can give you exclusive use of, they'll probably be polite enough not to laugh in your face. Unassigned swaths of spectrum are as rare as unclaimed swaths of land. But that doesn't mean that occupied communications channels are packed cheek to jowl up and down the electromagnetic spectrum. In fact, at any given time in any given place there is plenty of room to communicate.

The problem with making more efficient use of the various RF (Radio Frequency) bands lies in the way that transmitters and receivers operate. A transmitter sends out a signal on one or more channels, which is then picked up by a receiver listening on the same channel or channels. If two transmitters try to occupy exactly the same space at the same time, interference occurs and any listening receivers hear gibberish.

You may have experienced this using walkie-talkies, or hearing two broadcast radio stations cutting in and out on the same channel. WiFi networks and wireless phones using the same 2.4 GHz spectrum can also interfere to the point where one or both won't function properly.

Some services, such as radio and TV stations, transmit continuously 24/7. Those channels truly are spoken for. But other communications and data services only transmit some of the time. When nobody is transmitting, those channels might be used by another service. Even TV and Radio station channels aren't used to the fullest. Not every channel has a listenable signal in each and every location.

The major obstacle in the way of letting more services use the currently assigned spectrum is who's going to manage the traffic? If you just let everybody do what they want on any channel they want, you'll soon have little more than a bar room brawl where the commotion is so loud that nobody can hear anything. It's channels assigned and policed by a central authority that keeps things civil.

The way cellular telephony works gives a hint at one way to let many, many users use only a few channels without interference. A central switching system tells each phone what channel to use. When that call is done or the user moves out of range of a cellular base station, the channel is reassigned to another caller.

So is the answer to establish a central switching system for all communications and have it assign channels to whomever wishes to transmit at a given time? Very Orwellian or perhaps something reminiscent of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but not very practical and unbelievably expensive.

But what about building intelligence into the equipment that will use the spectrum? The rule could be that you can use any channel allocated for a particular purpose, but you have to listen before you transmit and only transmit if the channel is clear. In deference to established licensees, if the assigned user wants the channel, you have to get off immediately.

This is the idea behind proposed "white space" systems that would squat on unused TV channels to deliver services such as rural broadband. But it can be taken further and generalized into a concept known as cognitive radio. These would be smart radios based primarily on software that would be programmed to take a number of factors into account to avoid interfering with licensed or even unlicensed users of a communications channel. As long as there is some open spectrum, cognitive radios could find it and put it to good use.

Cognitive radio is a far cry from the crystal sets that pioneered radio broadcasting. Even the latest in spread spectrum systems that use sophisticated technology fall far short of radios that could be considered deep thinkers. White space transmitters still need to prove they can work reliably before anybody is going to unleash them on even TV channels where interference is unlikely. Expanding cognitive radio technology beyond that well-defined and limited application will be done slowly and carefully.

The sophistication of low cost processing chips may well be at the point where every radio can have a brain that is so agile and polite that shared usage of scarce spectrum is now practical. What's hard is accepting the idea that nothing is going to go wrong - go wrong - go wrong.

Is The World Going on a High Fiber Diet?

A recent research report shows that around the world, more people are now signing up for fiber optic Internet access than cable broadband. Yours is being installed next week, right?

Don't feel bad. The United States isn't exactly leading the charge in shunning copper in favor of fiber optic delivery. Certainly not in FTTH or fiber to the home service. Verizon's FiOS is about the only game going here. But in China, there are almost 17 million fiber optic service subscribers. We have about 2.6 million to put us in a solid fourth place behind Japan and Korea.

But wasn't satellite communications supposed to be the answer to unlimited worldwide communications? It was back when the space age began and twisted pair & coaxial copper cables were the only game in town. Or under the sea for that matter. Yes, there are low earth orbit (LEO) and geosynchronous satellite communications in place now and you can order satellite broadband any time you want. But it's still a specialized service almost 50 years after AT&T put the first Telstar satellite into orbit.

There are a couple of good reasons for this. Telstar service was only good for about 20 minutes at a time. Then you had to wait a couple of hours for it to come around again. To provide full-time communications, you need a constellation of LEO satellites like the ones used for GPS or Iridium service. With lots of satellites you could have the Internet overhead, but it's costly. Too costly for all those birds to get enough capacity for today's Internet usage.

The same thing is true for geosynchronous satellites, plus one other nagging problem. They're so far out in space that you lose a second or so between transmission, reception and confirmation among locations. That's latency and it's a killer for voice or other real-time two-way services. Latency is unimportant for one way communications such as satellite TV, where geosynchronous satellites have flourished.

Down here on Terra Firma and under the briny depths, it's copper, fiber or wireless. Nothing beats fiber for huge bandwidths at low latency. The fiber itself isn't all that costly, either. It's the installation. That drives most of the telcos nuts, since they spent the last 100 years burying copper. Now they have to go and do the job all over again.

Even so, fiber optic communications is not just the coming thing. It's the going thing right now. Nearly all nationwide and undersea communications is now on fiber. Competitive carriers are getting aggressive about building out points of presence (POPs) to serve business users who need and can afford fiber optic bandwidth levels.

Meanwhile copper is getting a second lease on life as an access technology for both residential and business users. Fiber is brought into the neighborhood and then delivered the last mile or two over conventional twisted pair copper wires. Cable broadband is headed for an upgrade to DOCSIS 3.0 to squeeze more bandwidth from coax as a delivery medium.

Meanwhile, the drumbeat of fiber optic Internet service grows louder and louder. It's just a matter of time now.

Smart Grids Picking the Bones of BPL

Have you been waiting anxiously next to your electrical outlets for the day when they'll spring to life with broadband Internet service as well as AC power? That day may never come now. It looks like Broadband over Power Line or BPL is fading fast as a consumer or business high speed Internet connection. Much to the chagrin of Amateur Radio operators who have been buzz kills about trying to kill the buzz in their shortwave receivers, BPL isn't going away. It's morphing into a communications service of, by and for the utilities. Perhaps therein lies a compromise that everyone can live with.

The tipping point for BPL deployment may have come with the recent story in the Dallas Morning News that Current Communications is shutting down its BPL service in Dallas that was intended to serve 2 million homes. Well, shutting down isn't quite the right terminology. It's only the consumer Internet users who are going to be kicked off. The installed transmission networking equipment is being sold to Oncor, the Texas electric transmission and distribution company. The existing BPL, plus some planned expansion, will become the communications backbone of Oncor's Smart Grid.

What's a Smart Grid? You know that electric utility power plants are connected to one of several wide area power grids that blanket the nation. That's not exactly a dumb grid arrangement, but if you've been the victim of a power blackout or brownout you might just call it that. The power grids are heavily managed to make sure that electrons being pushed into the wires by thousands of generating stations are matched with an equal number of electrons flowing out of the grid to power homes, factories, businesses, hospitals and street lights. There's a lot of measuring and watching going on, but it's still a very operator intensive control system.

Most of this has to do with the nature of electrical equipment. Over the last century there's been lots of standardization imposed. But it's mostly copper wires, mechanical circuit breakers, electromechanical relays and contactors, and encapsulated transformers lovingly referred to as "pole pigs." Then there's the really big stuff that transports Megawatts at hundreds of thousands of volts across the countryside. Still, lots of copper, iron core transformers and electromechanical switching.

The idea behind a "smart" power grid is to add two-way communications and control to equipment on the electrical grid. That may start with residential and business utility meters that can be read remotely and be expanded to let the power company switch on and off certain customer owned equipment. Some utilities are doing this with air conditioners to reduce line loads so the system won't overload on hot summer days. You let them control your AC usage. They give you a break on your electric bill. Hot water heaters are also being eyed for load management.

Smart Grids can be enhanced with intelligent equipment that will help them manage the diversity of alternative energy generators that individuals and corporations are connecting to the grid. The consumer is becoming a producer. If this trend takes off as expected, management of all these new solar, wind and hydro micro power plants could become a challenge to power companies used to ramping a relative handful of large power generators up and down. With a Smart Grid, they can make sure that the right amount of electricity is coming from and going to the right places, and that the myriad of small scale producers are properly compensated for their contributions. Under computer monitoring and control, kWh rates can vary by day part or even minute by minute.

Ultimately, computer control over a grid communications network can let the electric grid become self-healing. When one circuit, switch or transformer fails, the system can absorb the blow and re-route currents so that consumers stay powered. Why, it's almost like the Internet. Only with lots and lots of power. If you've ever seen the armada of cherry picker trucks lining the roadway after a major storm, with guys in buckets switching connections using long insulated poles, you know how far we are from a truly self-healing grid.

Who's one of the big names in Smart Grid technology? Why, Current of course. If BPL does wind up getting shorted out by huge costs, interference complaints and rapidly advancing alternative DSL, wireless and fiber optic Internet services, Smart Grids can likely sop up all the power line communications capability that Current and others can provide.

But how do you make BPL a good spectrum neighbor? That might prove to be both contentious and tricky, although there is hope. BPL technology is based on OFDM or Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing. That's a transmission technique that replaces one large carrier signal, like a TV or radio station, with dozens or hundreds of smaller carriers spaced up and down the spectrum. The FCC has said that BPL operators have to shut down individual carrier frequencies that cause interference to other services. But a Smart Grid that needs just enough bandwidth to monitor and control what needs controlling may not be as demanding as a consumer impatiently trying to download a full length movie. With clever spectrum management, it might just be possible to transmit utility signaling data on open wires without overpowering weak radio signals that others are listening to.

Contact Center Telecom Service Savings

Contact Centers consolidate communication services for companies and other organizations. That includes the telephone call center, FAX messaging, email and mail room.

Today's contact centers are heavy users of electronic communications and are likely to be the major telecom cost center for the company. A typical contact center may have a combination of technologies that include individual analog telephone or FAX lines, T1 or DS3 based digital telephone trunks, SIP trunking for VoIP based communications, broadband dedicated Internet service, and perhaps point to point private lines for PBX tie lines or electronic data transfer.

What contact center managers really need are voice and data services that save them money while maintaining or improving center performance and reliability. Thanks to competitive carriers and new technology introductions, it is indeed possible to get more for your telecom dollar on your next service contract.

The most basic service is the standard telephone line for local and/or long distance calling. Many companies have a need for both incoming and outgoing calls plus multiple toll free lines. In the call center, screen pops generated by CTI or Computer Telephone Integration increase staff productivity. For this you need Caller ID information as well as a voice channel.

T1 PRI or ISDN PRI is the proven telephone trunking technology that gives you multiple phone lines that can be configured as required, Caller ID data, and fast call setup & teardown to improve efficiency. A single T1 PRI offers up to 23 lines plus a signaling and data channel. A larger PBX telephone system can be configured to accept multiple T1 PRI lines. If your contact center is large enough to require hundreds of phone lines, DS3 telephone service can easily provide this cost effectively.

Alternatively, small contact centers may enjoy the cost savings of combined telephone and Internet service on a single Integrated T1 line. Integrated T1 service works well for operations that need from 6 to 12 outside lines plus broadband Internet access for a small team.

A competing technology to the traditional T1 PRI digital trunk is called SIP Trunking. SIP is Session Initiation Protocol, a popular signaling format for VoIP based telephone systems. SIP Trunking offers a single private line network connection between the contact center and service provider for converged voice and data. The service provider handles call termination with the public switched phone network, usually at very attractive rates.

Regardless of whether your contact center employs only a few people or a large staff, it is well worth a few minutes of your time to see how much you can save on your telecommunication services. Get a quick online quote now and also a free consultation by our telecom experts who can match your requirements with the most cost effective service options.