Is HPBX Your Next PBX?

It’s almost back to the future, to coin a phrase. Companies nationwide are getting rid of their phone switching equipment and going back to service providers, what we used to call telephone companies. Only the phones and the telephone trunk lines remain. Is technology reversing itself or is there something new going on here?

Make no mistake about it, telephony today is different from the telephone service of yesteryear. But there are similarities, too. What companies have found is that building and maintaining little telephone companies in-house entails a lot more cost and bother than you might expect. If that’s true, though, why did they ever leave good old Ma Bell in the first place?

One problem with business phone service versus what you have in your home is that there are lots and lots of phones. If you only have one or two lines, you probably have just one or two phones. It’s likely that each phone is tied to a particular phone line. Perhaps you have multi-line phones where each line has a switch or “key” so you can select it. Some small offices have only a single phone set one one line and use a second line to connect a FAX machine or credit card terminal.

So what’s the problem with having so many phones? It’s pretty likely that by the time you have a few dozen phones, your office facilities are so spread out that people can’t lean over to the next desk and have a conversation. They either have to get up and walk down the hall or make a phone call. If each phone has its own line, then those calls will go through the phone company and you’ll likely pay a charge. If you want to talk to someone in a branch office in another state, you’re surely going to pay long distance charges.

What companies really wanted was something of an intercom feature, where they could just dial a few digits and get to another phone in-house. To accomplish that, they bought PBX or Private Branch eXchange equipment. The PBX is the device that connects phones and also managed outside lines as needed. All the phones connect to the PBX and the PBX connects to the phone company, but only for calls leaving the premises.

The local telephone companies offer a service called Centrex (Central Office Exchange) to compete with the PBX. The switching equipment is kept at the central office, like always, but the system functioned more like a PBX. The Centrex system based on the individual copper pair from each phone to the CO is now being replaced by HPBX or Hosted PBX service.

What’s different about HPBX is that it is a VoIP phone system. Communication is over a WAN network connection called a SIP Trunk. This frees the user from being tied to a particular local phone company by those ubiquitous twisted copper pair. Now any service provider anywhere in the world can be your phone company as long as you can get a digital connection between their facilities and yours. What you need in-house is IP phones, also called SIP telephones, connected to your converged voice and data network. Your service provider hosts the PBX switching function with termination to the public switched telephone network as needed.

Are you ready for a phone system upgrade or merely concerned that what you are doing now costs more than it could? Get competitive quotes for hosted PBX telephone systems, some of which include new phones as part of the service fee.

Ethernet Service Providers Offer Cost Savings

One technological revolution quietly underway is the transition from circuit switched to packet switch WAN protocols. Many businesses first become aware that something is happening when they go to get price quotes for bandwidth upgrades or new line services. They expect to be buying a T1 line and find themselves ordering Ethernet over Copper instead. Why is this and what can you get for your bandwidth dollar these days?

The shifting ground of the telecom industry is being driven by a move to all-IP networks. The root cause is that computing devices, such as PCs, web servers, wireless access points, tablets, smartphones, telepresence, and IP PBX systems are generating network traffic that far exceeds traditional telephony. I included IP PBX in that group because an enterprise VoIP system with SIP phones connects via the LAN and uses Ethernet packets, not analog or proprietary digital signals. In most businesses, the common denominators are the LAN and the telephone network, with the phone network on the way out.

We’re now at a point where the crying need is to connect LANs together and to the Internet. We’ve been doing that with traditional telephone technologies such as T-Carrier and SONET for decades. If you were designing a comprehensive networking approach, would you pick one technology for the LAN and something completely different for metro and long haul networks? Wouldn’t you try to have a common protocol that runs everywhere for efficiency and ease of connection?

That’s what’s behind the rise of Carrier Ethernet. As more competitive carriers enter the market and older networks are upgraded, IP core networks are becoming more and more the rule. These are high speed fiber optic networks that have regional, national or even international service footprints. The last link in the chain is appropriately called the last mile connection. This is the wireline, fiber or wireless link that connects you to the service provider point of presence.

Ethernet services are available at every level of networking, from simple Internet access through international MPLS networks that link hundreds or thousands of sites. Most companies will want some type of dedicated Internet access. A 2x2 Mbps or 3x3 Mbps Ethernet over Copper line is a direct competitor to T1, at about the same price. It’s not uncommon to get twice the bandwidth for the same cost by choosing Ethernet rather than T-Carrier T1 or T3.

Ethernet is also more scalable than other telecom services. Typical bandwidth options include 2, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 50, 75 and 100 Mbps. Other increments between these levels may also be available, depending on the carrier. Those are just Ethernet over Copper offerings. Ethernet over Fiber takes you to 250, 500, 750 and 1,000 Mbps or up to 10 GigE.

You may want to install Ethernet Private Line or Ethernet Virtual Private Line service for a point to point connection between two business connections, like headquarters and a branch office. This replaces T1 or DS3 private line service at a better price.

One service that Ethernet offers, that you won’t find with traditional point to point connections is E-LAN or Ethernet LAN Service. It connects multiple LANs in a mesh topology at the layer 2 level. This lets you build one giant LAN that includes all of your remote location LANs.

Would you like to expand your service options and save 50% or more on line pricing compared to what you have now? Get instant online Ethernet service pricing up to 1 Gbps now. More complex multi-site networks need a bit of manual work, but will be quoted promptly.

How HD Audio Will Transform VoIP

Those of us old enough to remember when phones were analog and switches were mechanical have a soft spot for the clarity of the old school system. There was a distinctness and intimacy to those old time conversations that has long been lost. Well, perhaps lost only for some decades. There’s a new move afoot to give VoIP phone conversations a starting fidelity that will make today’s handsets and cellphones seem like toy walkie talkies by comparison.

The technology is HD or high definition audio. It’s called HD Voice by Polycom, the telephone manufacturer producing IP telephones with this capability built-in. The idea is to reverse the steady decline in voice intelligibility that we’ve experienced with the digital transformation and create a new standard that is superior to anything that has come before.

There’s a parallel here. Something similar happened in the radio industry. If you’ve ever owned one of those big console radios from the 1930’s or even the table models from the 50’s, you know that AM radio can sound amazingly lifelike. The advent of transistor radios shrunk the size of the loudspeakers, and thus the range of sound frequencies that can be heard. “Tinny” was the word to describe the loss of low end or bass notes. Car radios added their own restrictions by rolling off the high frequencies to reduce noise and static. It took a new technology, FM radio, to expand the frequency range and eliminate the background noise before the term high fidelity could be applied.

Old-timey phones had very few parts. The carbon microphone and electromagnetic earphone were powered by a battery at the phone company and connected to a similar phone at the other end. There were no electronics in the circuit. The telephone company switch was really a mechanical switch that simply connected phones together. The resulting sound had a richness that made local conversations much closer to someone sitting next to you than you hear today.

I remember when I first noticed the difference. It was when the company I worked for upgraded their old phone system with a new digital PBX and desksets. The first calls seemed slightly more muffled, less sparkling clear on the new phones. The effect was subtle, but noticeable. There was no noise or distortion apparent, but something was missing.

What was missing, I later figured out, was some of the audio range in the conversation. It wasn’t digital that degraded phone audio specifically. It started with long distance calling. The analog carrier multiplexing used to load multiple conversations onto copper wire and microwave trunk lines needed filters to keep one conversation from interfering with another. After much research, a frequency range of 300 to 3400 Hz was selected as standard. Frequencies above 3400 Hz add to naturalness, but don’t limit understandability of speech very much. Get rid of them and you can transmit more telephone channels on a trunk. You also get rid of annoying hiss, which is a high frequency phenomena. Frequencies below 300 Hz also aren’t necessary for intelligibility, but certainly give voices and other sounds their distinctiveness. By getting rid of the low frequencies, problems with power line hum getting into phone lines are greatly reduced or eliminated.

This standard was maintained when the industry changed from analog to digital. It kept everything compatible and consistent. Digital technology was a boon to long distance calls, especially overseas. It totally eliminated the noise and crosstalk that were common in the analog era. That advantage went away with cell phones, which can be noisy or even drop out.

Early implementations of VoIP only made matters worse. Packet transmission added distortion from lost packets and variable transmission time or jitter. Latency, a time delay through the network, was almost unknown with analog and TDM telephony. Now it’s not uncommon on poorly implemented systems to have a clipping effect so that you can’t both talk at the same time.

What HD audio intends to do is to lift telephone voice quality to a new standard above and beyond what we’ve ever had. This is accomplished by using a wideband CODEC (Coder/Decoder) to handle the conversion from analog microphone and earpiece to digital transmission. Bandwidth is doubled to 7 kHz with the new standard G.722 Codec and can be extended up to 20 Khz, the same quality as CDs and digital FM radio.

HD Voice is here now. You can get it with Polycom business phones and a service provider like RealLinx that can provide the hosted PBX and carefully managed bandwidth to maintain high quality phone audio. Of course, this only works within an organization that is set up for HD Voice or among users that all have the G.722 Codec available. When one party is using traditional telephone technology, everything defaults to the universal G.711 telco standard and its limited frequency range.

Even so, higher fidelity within your organization can improve conversation intelligibility, including nuances in the voice that are often lost when talking on the phone rather than in person. This can be valuable when budgets and time restrictions reduce face to face meetings in favor of audio and video teleconferencing.

Are you ready to replace an aging phone system or order equipment for a new enterprise or new location? If so, why limit yourself to yesterday’s technology when you can have something that will provide a competitive edge at lower overall cost than you have now? Don’t make a move until you get pricing and features on HD Voice Hosted PBX VoIP telephone systems.

SIP Trunking and Internet On a T1

Lots of smaller companies have T1 lines for dedicated Internet access. They installed these lines after frustration with consumer-grade broadband options didn’t perform well enough or were unavailable due to location. T1 gives them highly reliable, rock solid bandwidth at prices that have declined steadily over the years. They love their T1 lines. What they may be unaware of, however, is that they could be getting both broadband and telephone service over that same T1 line.

Traditional T1 line service comes in a number of flavors. The original implementation for the telephone industry consists of 24 channels of digitized telephone service on two pair of twisted copper phone wires. A device called a channel bank converts the multiplexed digital signal to and from 24 individual analog business phone lines.

A more popular version of the T1 telephone line is called ISDN PRI. It’s very popular with companies that have their own in-house PBX telephone system. With ISDN PRI, you get 23 outside lines plus a switching and data channel that speeds up connections and provides Caller ID for the phones.

Yet another implementation of T1 is the T1 data line. This version supplies point to point data connections between business locations or dedicated Internet access. The bandwidth is 1.5 Mbps for a single T1 line, but multiple lines can be bonded together to increase bandwidth to as high as 10 or 12 Mbps.

Most companies have a T1 line for data or Internet access plus separate telephone service, or one T1 for broadband Internet and a separate ISDN PRI to run the phone system. Smaller companies don’t get involved with multiple T1 lines because they only have a few office phones and don’t need 23 outside lines. They simply pay one phone bill for the number of business lines they have and a separate bill for their T1 service.

An option that may work just as well and save small businesses money is to have both the telephone service and Internet broadband on the very same T1 line. A conventional T1 line isn't intended to do this. It is set up to work as a telephone trunk line or a high speed data line. The configurations aren’t interchangeable. However, there is another flavor of T1 service that does provide the dual function of voice with data.

The traditional name for this service is Integrated T1. The latest offerings are called SIP trunking or SIP trunking with Internet.

What’s the difference? Actually, they are more alike than different. The way it works is that the service provider installs a device called an IAD or Integrated Access Device at each end of the T1 line. This device combines voice and data by converting them to a common protocol, which happens to be IP packets. Once in packet format, the IAD can manage line bandwidth to ensure that voice packets have priority over data packets so that telephone call quality is maintained no matter what sort of Internet activity is taking place.

Line bandwidth is shared. If there are no calls in progress, all 1.5 Mbps is used for broadband Internet. When a phone is picked up, bandwidth for that call, typically 90 Kbps or less, is reserved for that call. The rest is still used for the Internet. Note that the phone calls don’t actually go over the Internet. They simply share the T1 line connection to the service provider. The more calls that are simultaneous in progress, the more bandwidth is reserved for voice packets and the bandwidth for Internet access is proportionally reduced.

This process is sometimes called dynamic T1 or dynamic line service to reflect that the proportioning between voice and data is handled automatically. So, where does SIP trunking come in?

SIP is the switching protocol for VoIP phones. SIP trunking is a process of providing public phone system lines to a VoIP telephone system using the native Session Initiation Protocol. A SIP trunk will connect directly to your IP PBX for IP phones. It can also be configured to offer an analog handoff so you can use the analog business phones you have now.

What’s exciting about SIP Trunking and Internet on a T1 line is that it can often be less expensive than buying a T1 line and phone service separately. One company that specializes in this product is Vocal IP Networx. They can save you money by providing a single telecom bill each month at a cost that may well be less than what you pay now for the same quality of service.

Do you suspect that you might save money by consolidating your telephone and Internet service with one provider? If so, get competitive pricing for SIP Trunking and Internet on a T1 line and similar services and see if this option makes sense for you.

What Is MPLS?

You hear a lot about MPLS networks as a means of linking multiple business locations. But just what is MPLS and why it is better than other network topologies?

MPLS stands for Multi-Protocol Label Switching. It’s a completely different technology from what you may be familiar with in the way of either circuit switched or packet switched networks. You can transport IP traffic on an MPLS network but it does not use IP routing.

The beauty of MPLS networks is that they can transport nearly any protocol without having to do any protocol conversions to fit into the structure of the network. MPLS networks also offer a high degree of security because of their unique technology and because they are privately run networks available only to their customers. Quality of service is designed-in, which makes MPLS a good fit with enterprise VoIP and other latency sensitive applications.

Here’s a brief description of how MPLS works. You connect to the network “cloud” through a special device called a label edge router or LER. Since you are entering, this LER is an ingress router. At ingress, your packets are each encapsulated by adding a MPLS label to them. That label defines a FEC or forwarding equivalence class that determines where the packet is to be sent. As packets traverse the network, Label switching routers (LSR) look only at the label and not the internals of the packet to determine how to route them. At the destination, the labels are removed by a LER that functions as an egress router. The packet now exits the network looking exactly as it did upon entering.

It’s the use of the labels that makes MPLS unique and inherently more secure than, say, the Internet. Someone who found a way to snoop on the data traversing the MPLS network would be completely flummoxed since they would not have knowledge of labels used on that particular network. It’s far fetched that you’d have access to MPLS network data at all, since it does not traverse public networks. For this reason, MPLS networks are also called MPLS VPN. If you want even more security than this, you can encrypt your packets as well as transport them on an MPLS VPN.

MPLS networks support quality of service through the label technology and careful network engineering. The labels have a 3 bit traffic class field that designates quality of service, priority and explicit congestion notification. The network operator has the responsibility of ensuring there is adequate bandwidth to accommodate all customers. MPLS networks are designed for mesh networking, although they can also be set up as point to point connections to link two locations only.

With the move to Carrier Ethernet, MPLS networks are a natural for interconnecting large numbers of sites on a national or even international basis. Each site needs an access connection, which can be Ethernet over Copper or Ethernet over Fiber, depending on bandwidth requirements. The MPLS network will transport the Ethernet packets without changing them. This way you have an end to end Ethernet network without having to maintain a long haul network yourself. The transparency of MPLS lets you establish layer 2 switched connections if you desire them.

Economy of scale makes MPLS networks very cost effective for inter-state or international connections. You’ll have the quality of service you expect with dedicated line services along with the flexibility of a “cloud” that can accommodate additional site connections or increased bandwidth requirements easily.

Is a MPLS solution right for your organization? If you have multiple locations that need to be connected regardless of the protocol or application, you’ll want to get MPLS network services pricing for your particular needs.



Note: MPLS network diagram courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Voice over Internet Protocol Phone Services

Voice or Internet Protocol or VoIP appears destined to replace traditional wireline telephone services such as POTS (Plain Old Telephone Services) and even ISDN PRI digital trunks. What’s behind this shift in technology and what’s the key to maintaining voice quality with a new type of phone service.

The fundamental shift in technology can really be boiled down to a move toward computer networks and away from telephone networks. Also in the mix is the inclusion of wireless voice and data services that add another layer of complication.

Telephone networks started with Alexander Graham Bell and remained largely analog for most their century of dominance. Back when everyone had a telephone line and nobody knew what broadband meant, there was an effort to get the telephone system to do double duty as a means of voice communication and also computer communication via analog modems. This quickly hit its technical limit because the telephone network was designed for the human voice, which has a very low bandwidth requirement.

There was an effort to move to digital phone lines, called ISDN, but it was too little too late. Cable and DSL broadband offered much higher speeds at lower cost. Businesses ordered T1 and T3 lines, originally developed for digitizing phone lines and bundling them to save transmission costs between telco offices. These digital lines work just fine as point to point or dedicated Internet connections for data transmission. In fact, they’re still the most popular connectivity for small and medium businesses because of plunging prices and high reliability.

VoIP came out of the computer, not telephone, world. The IP stands for Internet Protocol, the most popular networking standard. Yes, it does say Internet protocol, but that doesn’t mean it is limited to the Internet. In fact, the Internet would have probably stayed an obscure academic network had it not been for the development of Ethernet as a way to connect computers and their peripherals.

The difference between telephone networks and computer networks is the difference between switched circuit networks and packet switched networks. Switched circuit networks, like the telephone network, actually switch connections to set up a private path for each phone call. This is bit like switching electrical circuits to power something as long as you need to use it. Packet switched networks are more like the US Mail. The network provides hard pathways to every destination. Each letter or packet gets where it is going by looking at the address for that individual packet and routing it accordingly.

VoIP is simply a way to send a set of packets in real time that are digitized pieces of a telephone conversation. Put them together end to end and the voice from the distant location is recreated. When it works well it sounds just like a telephone call, although you can also use a computer for two way conversations if it has a microphone and loudspeakers or earbuds.

Just like computers have struggled to press the century old telephone system into service for carrying data packets, computer networks have struggled with carrying sensitive voice packets on a system designed to reliably transfer data files even if parts had to be resent due to network errors. When VoIP goes bad, it sounds garbled and clips each side of the conversation. That’s a symptom of a network that isn’t optimized for real time voice packets that have to get through without error, jitter and time delay (latency).

The Internet is hit and miss when it comes to carrying VoIP telephony. If you have sufficient bandwidth and little congestion, you can experience a decent quality call. That’s especially true if cell phone call quality is what you are comparing to. If the Internet is having problems or getting congested, you may come to miss your old faithful landline.

Businesses that require optimal voice quality don’t use the Internet as their phone connection. Instead, they use private lines or MPLS networks that are engineered to support packet voice signals. You may hear this referred to as enterprise voice or enterprise VoIP, even though there is no Internet involved with the Internet protocol in this case.

Are you considering a move to VoIP with your next business telephone system upgrade? If so, be sure to understand the costs and tradeoffs with Internet vs non-Internet implementations. You can get that help along with pricing and availability for Enterprise VoIP telephony at no cost or obligation for serious business applications.

MegaPath Merges Integrated and Hosted Voice

Telephone switching has migrated over the decades from the local telephone company to the enterprise and now out to the cloud. MegaPath is building a bridge from in-house phone systems to cloud telephony by adding hosted services to their Integrated Voice services. This could be the cost effective transition you’ve been looking for.

If all you are doing is buying a few analog business lines from your local phone company and running them through a small business phone system you got at one of the big box office stores, you’ve pretty much got what you are going to get. Small companies have a way of growing to become medium size companies, however, and a two or four line system with a half dozen desk sets is quickly outgrown.

This is where most businesses call in a local phone system dealer who installs and maintains a particular brand of business phone system. With an in-house PBX (Private Branch Exchange), you’ll be adding more outside lines but now you have the opportunity to shop around. You can get your analog lines from a competitive provider or move up to digital trunk lines to save money once you get more than 6 to 12 lines.

MegaPath, a major competitive carrier with a nationwide service footprint, has a service called Integrated Voice specifically tailored to SMBs with their own PBX systems. They provide the outside lines that connect your PBX system to the world. The interface can be traditional analog lines for smaller systems, T1-CAS or ISDN-PRI digital trunks for medium and larger systems, or SIP Trunking for the newer IP PBX systems that support enterprise VoIP.

The Integrated feature of Integrated Voice is that you get both telephone and broadband service over the same dynamic DSL, T1 or Ethernet connection. This is a bit different from simply adding a third party VoIP service to your broadband service. With Integrated Voice, the combined data/voice is carefully managed to ensure that voice packets have priority over data packets so that using your computers won’t cause the telephone calls to break up. Any time a phone wants to make or receive a call, the bandwidth for this is reserved from the Integrated pool. Bandwidth not used for phone calls is automatically assigned for broadband Internet access.

Integrated Voice services are popular with small to medium size businesses because nearly every business needs both telephone lines and broadband Internet access. You can pay for these separately or have a more efficient and cost effective solution that combines the two.

Hosted Voice is a different animal. With hosted services, you no longer have a PBX system on your premises. Instead, you use a much larger PBX that is located at your service provider. It’s as if the service provider has become the new phone company. All you have in-house are telephones. These can be traditional phones that connect to an adaptor called a voice gateway or SIP Phones that are designed to connect directly to your network.

Hosted Voice services, also known as hosted PBX, are popular with companies that haven’t invested in their own PBX system or want to avoid the capital outlay for a needed upgrade and the ongoing maintenance headaches. All of those issues move to the service provider. As a user, you don’t perceive that the phone system is in the cloud rather than in the basement of your building. You may also enjoy advanced features such as remote worker, find me/follow me, simultaneous ring, auto attendants and hunt groups that weren’t available on your old PBX system.

MegaPath has been offering both the Integrated Voice and Hosted Voice services. What they’re doing now is giving businesses the chance to add Hosted Voice features to their Integrated Voice service as an overlay to their lines or trunks. This offers the opportunity for companies to gain more features almost instantly without the headache and expense of completely redoing their phone system right away. It’s something of a hybrid cloud approach where some of the equipment is on-site and some is in the cloud at the service provider’s facility.

Are you interested in upgrading your current business phone system with more advanced features or getting a better price on phone lines and trunks? If so, check out Integrated and Hosted Voice Services for business locations to find the mix that works best for you.

MPLS VPLS Offers Virtual Private LAN Service

Nearly every business has its own LAN or Local Area Network based on some combination of wired and wireless Ethernet. For businesses with a single office, everything is self-contained other than a single broadband connection to the Internet. What about businesses with many locations that include branch offices, franchises, warehouses, factories and data centers? Each of those locations also has its own self-contained LAN. The question is how to best connect them together.

There are all sorts of schemes used to provide inter-office connectivity, including using the Internet as a VPN or Virtual Private Network. Other companies, seeking more security or higher performance have created their own private networks using dedicated private lines from each location back to headquarters. This is an elegant, but both expensive and management intensive solution. Is there anything better?

The introduction of MPLS networks created the opportunity for companies to get out of the proprietary network business and turn that traffic over to a privately run network that could interconnect their many locations in a secure and high performance fashion. There’s a substantial cost savings involved because MPLS networks aren’t dedicated to the traffic of only one customer. The cost of the network is amortized over the entire customer base, reducing the cost for each.

Isn’t this the same as using the Internet to communicate? Not by a long shot. The Internet is a public resource that allows easy access to anyone and everyone with the modest price of a connection. There are no performance or security guarantees. Even so, for connection to the general public, the Internet is a terrific bargain. It’s just that you may not want your internal company communications on such a public network.

MPLS networks have inherently better security because they don’t use IP routing in their core. Instead they use a proprietary system called label switching that determines how packets get from one location to another. It’s all very deterministic and programmed by the network operator to ensure that each company’s data is visible only to that company. Resources are managed to ensure a committed level of bandwidth and technical characteristics such as latency, jitter and packet loss.

It sounds like MPLS networks are ideal for interconnecting business locations. In fact, MPLS networking has been growing rapidly and now includes the ability to connect to sites nationwide and even internationally. The quality of service controls make it particularly well suited to support latency sensitive applications such as VoIP telephony and teleconferencing.

VPLS is a particular service offered by MPLS networks. It stands for Virtual Private LAN Service. Like any MPLS network, it interconnects two or more locations anywhere served by the network. But VPLS has some unique characteristics. It’s not just a mechanism to transport traffic. It’s a system that interconnects multiple LANs as if they were all part of a single bridged LAN. In other words, two offices on opposites coasts are just as close on the network as if they were right down the hall from each other.

With VPLS, companies can truly create virtual organizations that are co-located on the network if not physically. There are a couple of technical requirements that must be met to do this. The virtual LAN depends on everything being connected through layer 2 switching rather than layer 3 routing. That means you’ll need Ethernet connections to the MPLS network. These can be Ethernet over Copper, Fiber, Fixed Wireless, or DS1 (T1) connections as appropriate. VPLS arrangements are also meshed by nature. They operate on an any-to-any basis, just like you’d expect on a LAN.

Does a VPLS network sound like what you need to interconnect your business locations? If so, get prices and availability on MPLS VPLS Ethernet Virtual Private LAN Service for as many locations as you need to support.

SMB Phone System Needs Only Phones

Anyone who wrestles with programming and maintaining an in-house phone system occasionally longs for the days when you just plugged in the phone, lifted the receiver and there was dial tone. Those days have returned with the rise of cloud communications systems.

The magic is in moving the complicated switching equipment to a service provider who keeps it up to date, well maintained and easily expanded when your needs change. The name of this service is Hosted VoIP or Hosted PBX. The hosted part means that someone else provides the bulk of the telephone system and the connectivity to the public switched telephone network. What you have in-house is the telephones.

These aren’t just any phones. They are IP phones designed to connect to computer networks rather than plugging into a phone outlet. The electrical signals are completely different, but then so are the connectors. That little RJ-11 telephone plug? It’s been replaced by a fatter RJ-45 plug. Does it look familiar? That’s because this is the same connector used by most computer equipment. In fact, your telephone has become a networked device, just like a PC or printer.

In a typical hosted VoIP system, you have a converged voice and data network that connects to both your telephones and other computer equipment. There are no separate telephone wires. Convergence is the process of making sure that one network can handle the very different requirements of data and voice. Phone conversations are very sensitive to network limitations such as latency, jitter and congestion that don’t bother data transfers or Internet access.

Does that mean that there is a problem with having broadband Internet access on the same network with your telephones? Not necessarily. In fact, the best enterprise VoIP solutions have voice, video, Internet, file transfers and other processes running simultaneously without conflict. The trick is engineering QoS or Quality of Service into the network so that different classes of packets don’t interfere. Just plugging everything into the LAN and hoping for the best is going to cause problems.

One trick in making VoIP work for business is to keep the telephone service off the Internet but allow the two to co-exist otherwise. Why? Because the Internet is great for data connections and one-way downloads of media such as audio and video. It’s the instantaneous two-way nature of phone conversations that can get compromised on a network designed for one way transfers that take whatever time is required to ensure every packet is sent and received correctly.

There’s a service of special interest to small and medium size businesses called SIP Trunking. A SIP trunk is the broadband connection between you and your service provider. This is a private line connection that is engineered to carry both phone service and broadband Internet. The two share the line but don’t Interfere. They are split at the service provider’s end, with the phone lines going to the hosted PBX and the broadband routed to the Internet.

Would you like to have only telephones to deal with in your business and leave management of the telephone system to someone else? If so, then it pays to look into Hosted VoIP Solutions to get the features you want without the cost and complexity of an in-house phone system.

Where Competition Is Cutting Telecom Costs

Everyone is on the lookout for cost savings these days. One potential area of savings is in your monthly telecom costs. Telecom expenses tend to be be large and murky. It’s well worth your while to wade in and see what you can spot that is ripe for cutting or re-bidding. You should also be aware that there can be huge differences in what you pay depending on where you are located.

We tend to think that the price of goods and services are pretty much the same no matter where you are. You know that’s not true for real estate. It’s also not true for some telecom services. Location means everything. Let’s take a look at why this is.

We get the impression that telephone calls are all priced at a flat rate. That impression comes from the way cellular phone service is sold. You pay a flat rate for a fixed number of minutes each month. It doesn’t matter where you call, within the US and not overseas. A minute is a minute. You can call from your home office or you can call from a hotel in another state and talk to anyone in the country using the same minutes you use for local calls.

Landline services don’t generally work that way. You pay a monthly fee for dial tone and local calls. You typically pay by the minute for state to state long distance calls. There is also something called local long distance or IntraLATA (Local Access and Transport Area). A LATA is a geographical area handled by a particular phone company. These areas may include more than one city or a city and the surrounding rural areas. Prices for IntraLATA calls vary all over the place, with areas served by smaller phone companies typically more expensive than you’ll find in areas served by larger phone companies in more populous areas.

What’s upset the apple cart on this pricing model is the rise of VoIP service providers. Unlike local phone companies that are tied to their customers by dedicated twisted pair copper phone wiring, VoIP is a network service that is transported by the Internet, a private SIP trunk, or an MPLS VPN network. Your VoIP provider can be a Cable operator in your city or a carrier located across the country. Pricing plans can be similar to what you get from the telephone company or they can be unlimited local calling with a flat per minute rate for all long distance, or even a flat rate for unlimited domestic calling. By considering a VoIP solution, you give yourself more options to match your monthly telecom expenses closely with the type of calls you typically make and receive.

Competition in the line services market is even more intense. Here, the price you pay per Mbps for point to point data links or dedicated Internet access varies widely. In general, the closer you are located to the heart of a metropolitan business center, the better the pricing. Out in the country, your options are few and prices are higher.

A new service that has highly attractive bandwidth prices is Ethernet over Copper. Prices for both EoC and T1 lines are now under $300 a month in major cities, but you may get twice the T1 bandwidth for that price using Ethernet over Copper. You also have the ability to get higher bandwidths, such as 10 or 20 Mbps without having to bring in fiber optic service.

One limitation with Ethernet over Copper is that you need to be within about 12,000 feet, a couple of miles or so, of the service provider’s point of presence to qualify for service. That restricts availability to metro areas. So, too, other competing services such as HFC (Hybrid Fiber Coax) and fixed wireless tend to have limited geographical service areas and tend to be found in town much more than farther out.

Regardless of whether you are looking for voice, data or video telecom services, or some combination, competition is greater today than ever before. You may not be aware of many options that have recently become available in your area. One fast and easy way to see if you can save on your monthly telecom expenses is to get competitive quotes for telecom services suitable for your business location. This process is fast, easy and free. You may be able to save more than you think.

Where Hosted PBX Solutions Save

Business telephone systems range from the very simple with a few phones and a few lines to complex private branch exchanges that support multiple sites. The new approach is a hosted PBX that makes things simple again. But do hosted PBX solutions really save anything and can they maintain voice quality?

With the simplest arrangement of a single landline phone connected to the local phone company, there really isn’t much to manage. You pay so much per month for “dial tone” that makes your phone work and gives you typically unlimited local calling. You have the option to switch to a different provider for long distance service or use a dial-around service for international calling. These are options to save you on the per minute calling rates.

The basic analog or POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) phone service seems simple because all the complexity is at the other end of the wire. What you don’t see or have to deal with is the intricacies of connecting your line to any of billions worldwide or to even more billions of wireless callers. If you have, say, 3 business locations with 1 phone each, they talk to each other by dialing up the desired location just like any other phone number.

Businesses found out just how complex the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) was when they got big enough to have lots of desk phones and a dozen or more outside lines. What many companies did was to buy their own telephone switching system called a PBX (Private Branch Exchange.) The advantage of having your own PBX system is that calls within the company stay on your own wiring and you don’t have to pay the telephone company to connect them. That includes more complex PBX arrangements with digital tie lines that connect multiple locations in a private network. Once again, the motivation is to keep as many calls as possible off the public network to avoid “toll” charges.

Many companies have rued the day the got into the telephone business. PBX systems are expensive to buy and need constant updates as employees move within the company. There is also maintenance activity for both the PBX and its telephone network wiring.

Hosted PBX is a fairly new service that offers to offload the expense of in-house phone systems. It only became possible when most companies installed Local Area Networks for their computers and the price of private digital lines became affordable. The enabling technology is VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol. In this case, Internet refers to the technology standard and not necessarily use of the public Internet.

Hosted PBX refers to using a large PBX telephone system that is located or hosted by a third-party service provider. This PBX is big enough to handle the telephone traffic of many different companies to gain an economy of scale. In a way, this is similar to going back to the days where each phone was individually connected to a local telephone company that took care of call switching.

So, where does the cost savings come from? Network consolidation is one area. Both telephones and computers run on a single converged voice and data network. There are no separate telephone wires. This network is extended to the hosted PBX provider using a private digital line called a SIP trunk. You are not tied to a particular service provider. There are many competing hosted PBX solutions and that competition is another way that cost savings can be offered.

The private SIP trunk helps to maintain high voice quality because it provides the characteristics of low latency, jitter, packet loss and congestion, along with quality of service mechanisms that keep data packets from interfering with voice packets. You can also buy Internet based hosted PBX services at lower costs, but the vagaries of the public Internet can introduce distortion and clipping in the conversations.

Do hosted PBX solutions offer a real cost savings for your company? It depends on how many seats you have, what features you want and what your existing system is costing you. If you are close to replacing an aging PBX or one that has run out of capacity, the economics highly favor hosted solutions. To decide for yourself, get competitive pricing on hosted PBX solutions for business. It may come down to whether you want to pay as you go versus investing in your own in-house phone system.

HFC Broadband For Business

Many small businesses don’t fall into the category of “residential” users but don’t need or can’t afford the cost of traditional business telecom services, such as T1 lines or Ethernet over Copper. One possible solution is HFC or Hybrid Fiber Coax broadband services.

Hybrid what? You may have heard of this as Cable broadband for business. A lot of home based businesses successfully use Cable broadband to manage their websites, access information on the Web and send and receive email. But try to order residential service for a business location and you’ll get turned down flat. That’s because residential broadband is priced for single homes and apartments with few people accessing the service and probably no-one online most of the day. Knowing that, some business owners incorrectly assume that you can’t get Cable run into a business. But you can.

So, what’s available and why the funny name? HFC or Hybrid Fiber Coax refers to the technology used to deploy high speed Internet access, telephone service, and Cable television. You know that Cable TV and Cable broadband are called that because of the coaxial cable that provides the connection to the network. When Cable systems were first deployed, they were constructed from various size coaxial cables. What’s happened in recent years is that the long connection from the Cable office or the “head end” where the signals are picked up and run for miles to various neighborhoods has been replaced by fiber optic cable. The last few hundred feet or so are still copper coaxial cable, also called coax. The result is a system that is a hybrid of fiber optic cable and coax cable known as Hybrid Fiber Coax or HFC.

Why go with a hybrid arrangement rather than just make it fiber optics all the way? It’s mostly a matter of cost. While fiber has a far larger capacity, there is a lot of coax already in the ground. The interface connection at the premises, either a Cable modem or set top box, is much less expensive than the termination equipment needed for fiber. Don’t count that coax down and out yet, either. With digital signals, there is more than enough bandwidth for triple-play services to small and medium businesses as well as consumers.

With an already built-out infrastructure and a high number of users to cover costs, you might expect that HFC services are lower in cost than most telecom services available for the SMB. You’re right, they are. But you need to know the performance tradeoffs to make a smart buying decision.

One excellent use for HFC is broadband Internet access when employee use is primarily Web browsing and email. That includes information research, making purchases, doing simple banking, messaging customers, providing a WiFi hotspot and so on. If most of what you do is similar to the way you use a computer at home, HFC should work just fine. You select a bandwidth tier that offers enough speed to work efficiently and still saves you money over other options. Typical bandwidth for smaller businesses goes up to 15 Mbps download and 2 Mbps upload, although some Cable companies are offering speeds as high as 50 or even 100 Mbps.

You’ll likely be able to get a high speed Internet solution that meets your needs with a lot more bandwidth than a T1 line offers and for a lot less money. But beware. T1 lines are dedicated bandwidth that stays a rock solid 1.5 Mbps all the time. Cable bandwidth is shared among all the users on the Cable and can vary all over the place. That’s one way they hold the cost down. If you are running high traffic ecommerce servers or using business processes that expect constant bandwidth, you might find the speed variations not worth the cost savings. Otherwise, you might be quite happy with both the performance and reliability of HFC broadband.

Another service that Cable companies have gotten into is business telephone, essentially VoIP. One big difference between this service and simply running a third party VoIP service over your broadband connection is that the Cable version never transits the Internet. The voice packets travel over the cable network and are then terminated to the public telephone network by the Cable company or a telephone service provider. By doing it this way, the HFC operator has more control of things like latency, packet loss and network congestion to ensure decent voice quality.

Finally, HFC offers Cable TV channels. After all, that’s why the network was built in the first place. Businesses with waiting rooms, like automotive service centers and doctor’s offices, can put business Cable TV service to good use.

Have you been frustrated by your current choices in network services? Why not compare prices, availability and service features of HFC, T1 and Ethernet so you can make the best buying decision? You may be surprised by the range of options available.



Note: Diagram of coaxial cable construction courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Types of Business Telephone Lines

Business telephone lines, once available in only a single analog version, have proliferated over the years. You can still get the legacy analog subscriber loop. You can also get a variety of digital lines and trunks that may offer cost and performance advantages.

The basic business telephone line is little changed from its invention over a century ago. It consists of a single small gauge twisted pair copper wires that carry all the necessary signals. This is an analog telephone line. Analog phone service is also known as POTS for Plain Old Telephone Service. Many businesses have multi-line phones, but all they do is connect to multiple POTS lines. One to four lines is typical of a small office phone system. If there are lighted pushbuttons for each outside line, this may be called a “key” telephone system.

POTS telephone lines generally include local and long distance calling, features such as Caller ID, 3 way calling, and perhaps a toll free number. One POTS line may be connected full time to an office FAX machine. Some companies that have digital telephone systems may still keep a POTS line for the FAX machine, as not all digital services support FAX.

The simplest digital phone line is a single VoIP or broadband phone service that uses the Internet as a substitute for the twisted pair analog phone line. The cost savings realized is due to the fact that most businesses need broadband Internet access as well as telephone service. Using the Internet to connect the phone to the service provider avoids the charges for a separate telephone line.

The main limitation to broadband phone service is that the Internet was never designed to support high quality two-way real time voice or video services. It is critical to have enough bandwidth to support all the voice and data traffic on the broadband connection and to give voice packets priority. When bandwidth becomes restricted, voice quality starts to get garbled and the call may even be dropped. Another factor is latency or time delay between source and destination. The longer the latency, the more the phone starts to act like a two-way radio where only one person can talk at a time. Latency is seldom, if ever, a factor on analog lines or carefully engineered private networks.

Enterprise VoIP systems, consisting of many telephone sets connected to a converged voice and data LAN, avoid the limitations of the Internet by using dedicated circuits transport calls between internal phones and to the connection point or termination with the Public Switched Telephone Network. That termination may be within the company, where the connection is to multiple POTS lines or a digital trunk line. It may also be at a service provider connected to the enterprise by a converged voice and data line called a SIP Trunk.

A “trunk” line is simply a bundling of multiple telephone lines in one cable. That may be a fat cable with many analog copper pair or it can be a digital trunk line with few wires that transport many telephone calls in channels or packet streams.

The most popular digital trunk line is called ISDN PRI. This is also called T1 PRI because it is carried on a T1 digital line. What a PRI digital trunk gives you are up to 23 outside telephone lines plus a dedicated channel for switching signals and data such as Caller ID. Some PBX telephone systems have provisions to connect to two or more PRI trunks. This is especially true for call centers and large corporate office buildings. Note that each of the business lines in the ISDN PRI trunk can be configured as local, long distance, inbound only, outbound only, toll free or some combination of these per customer requirements.

The newest business telephone trunk is called SIP Trunking. SIP is the control and signaling protocol for VoIP telephone systems. One SIP trunk can carry dozens of phone calls, even more than a PRI trunk. The other way SIP trunks can be configured is for both voice and data on the same line. This is especially valuable for companies that have converged networks shared by both computers and telephones. The SIP services provider brings in both broadband Internet access plus business telephone lines on the same SIP trunk.

What type of service will work best for your company? There may be a range of options to choose from. Get prices and availability for business telephone service now, so you have up to date information to make an informed purchasing decision.

866 Toll Free Numbers

We’re all familiar with 800 numbers. They were the first numbers we recognized as toll free. But did you know that there are other toll free numbers, too? What about 866? Is that really a toll free prefix?

Indeed it is. But is there a difference between 800 and 866 as far as toll free operation is considered? No, they work exactly the same. Just as 202 and 302 are toll number prefixes assigned to different locations, 800 and 866 are toll free numbers used nationwide.

That’s one difference between toll prefixes and toll free prefixes. Toll prefixes are used to designed numbers in a particular area. That’s why they are called area codes. Area code 202 is assigned to Washington, DC. Area code 302 is assigned to the entire state of Delaware.

The toll free number prefixes 800 and 866 do not have a geographical assignment. You can call an 800 or 866 number from anywhere in the country and you’ll reach your destination. You just may not know where, geographically, the number is being answered.

It should be noted that the idea of associating area codes with the physical location of the assigned telephone is going away with landlines being replaced by cell phones and VoIP or broadband phone. Neither wireless or broadband users are tethered to a particular location by a copper wire. In fact, some VoIP providers let you pick your desired area code regardless of where you happen to reside. That’s especially valuable when most of your calls come from a particular regional area. Calls from an area code to the same area code don’t pay interstate long distance charges. If your phone has a New York City area code, it will work like any other NYC local phone, even if you pick up the calls in San Francisco.

Toll free numbers take this concept to the next level. When someone dials a toll free number, they don’t pay for the toll charges regardless of where they are calling from or where the call is picked up. Please note that most toll free numbers are US only. You have make special arrangements to get an International toll free number.

Now let’s look at what happens on the receiving end of the call. If you are the owner of the toll free number, you’ll pay the cost of any calls you receive. Fortunately, with an inexpensive toll free service that cost will be minimal. What you get in return is a caller who is much more likely to dial your number than if they knew they had to pay long distance charges. This is a powerful incentive for call-in orders and customer service. In fact, customers have come to expect a toll free number and may balk at dealing with companies that don’t offer one.

Are toll free numbers really affordable by smaller businesses? Absolutely. You can get an 866 number assigned to you for just $2 and pay just $2 a month to maintain service. That service includes your exclusive use of the number, forwarding to any working phone including a cell phone, voice mail, plus FAX reception that forwards to your email. The cost of the calls is just 6.9 cents per minute for the continuous 48 US states. Calls from Alaska and Hawaii cost a bit extra.

For the same price as an 866 toll free number, you can also get one with the prefix 877 or 888. They work just the same as 866. You can also get an 800 number for the slightly higher fee of $5 plus $5 per month service fee and the same 6.9 cents per minute rate.

Is your business losing business because you don’t have a toll free number yet? Perhaps you should give toll free service a try. There are no contracts involved. You pay via credit card from month to month. Learn more about low cost toll free numbers and get yours ready to use right now.

Note: Photo of telephone keypad courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

SIP Trunks vs ISDN PRI

Enterprise telephony long ago advanced beyond analog business lines in favor of PBX telephone systems and ISDN PRI trunking. Now there’s another option that may offer cost and performance advantages for companies that want to improve their voice services. It’s called SIP Trunking. Let’s compare and contrast SIP Trunks with ISDN PRI to see how to choose between them.

You should know that we are still talking exclusively about digital telephony. There is no analog transport in either a SIP Trunk or PRI. What differentiates the two is that ISDN PRI is based on a switched circuit model and SIP Trunking is based on packet switching.

For many companies it could be six of one and a half-dozen of the other. That’s because either trunking service can be made to work with your in-house phone system. The idea behind digital trunking is to carry a half-dozen or more outside phone lines on a single digital line. Usually that’s one or more T1 lines, although DS3, OC3 fiber or Ethernet can also be used.

ISDN PRI uses a T1 line configured into 23 separate voice channels plus one data and control channel. Most PBX systems and the newer IP PBX phone systems make it easy to connect to ISDN PRI. They either offer one or more PRI ports built-in or accommodate a plug-in adaptor card.

If you need more than 23 lines, you simply add more ISDN PRI lines incrementally. Each additional line can bring in up to 23 more business phone lines. You’ll have to check what’s available for your phone system, but it is not uncommon to have 2 to 4 PRI lines plugged into a PBX system.

The technology used for ISDN PRI is defined by the Integrated Systems Digital Network specification. PRI is the Primary Rate Interface. There is also a lower performance BRI or Basic Rate Interface that isn’t seen much anymore. This is a legacy telephone technology designed to support the idea of separate digitized telephone lines, one per channel. There’s no chance of interference between calls because the channels are strictly defined and timed using Time Division Multiplexing.

SIP Trunking is more of a network than a telephone based technology. It is a packet switched network line, much like you would use to connect two business locations. What SIP Trunking can do is directly support a converged voice and data network. You can run SIP Trunks between business locations to expand your voice and data network geographically.

The SIP in SIP Trunking stands for Session Initiation Protocol. That’s the switching technology used in VoIP telephone systems. In SIP trunking the control signals for the phone system are transported in packets that travel down the same network pipe as the voice packets.

ISDN PRI isn’t so much about convergence. It’s really about having separate telephone and data lines leave the premises, although you are free to converge your in-house network and let an IP PBX system on the network handle call routing, including outside calls on the ISDN PRI trunk line.

SIP Trunking doesn’t have to be about convergence, either. You can simply use a SIP Trunk to connect your PBX system to a telephone service provider rather than using an ISDN PRI. Depending on which CODEC or coding scheme you use, you may be able to handle more than 23 lines on a SIP Trunk. If you are using an Ethernet connection to your provider, you may be able to support dozens of phone lines depending on the bandwidth available.

For small businesses, SIP Trunks can be configured to transport both voice and data to your service provider. Most often this is used to bring in telephone lines and broadband Internet service on the same SIP Trunk. There’s a cost advantage, even if you are not running a converged voice and data in-house.

Since either ISDN PRI or SIP Trunking might be able to support your needs, how do you choose? That depends on the features you desire and what’s available to serve your particular business location. You may have several options to choose from. To find out, check out SIP Trunks and ISDN PRI availability and pricing now.

Fixed Mobile Convergence Comes To the Cloud

Most business professionals today are toting smartphones as well as tablets and netbooks or laptop computers. At the office, there’s a large monitor desktop computer connected to the company LAN and a desk speakerphone. The challenge? How do you make these devices part of a unified whole?

This is the challenge corporate IT departments have been wrestling with as the variety of communications devices has multiplied faster than the means to interconnect them. Many times, the best option is to print new business cards with separate listings for office phone, mobile, FAX, toll free and email. Did you get an important call on your office phone while you were offsite making a presentation? Oops. You’ll get it when you get back to the desk tomorrow. Or you can call in and check your voice mails tonight, write down the number and then call back the client when business hours resume. Just hope your competition didn’t return the call sooner.

Modern solutions to this dilemma of integrating disparate tools into a common business system include enterprise VoIP, unified communications and fixed mobile convergence. Getting wireline or network voice telephony to mesh with cellular phones has been a particularly knotty problem. The one area of commonality has been the public switched telephone network. But the PSTN likes each device to have its own phone number. What if you want one number to be able to reach you no matter where you are or what phone is handy?

Smoothstone IP Communications specializes in converging voice and data networks.
They were first to introduce a converged voice and data service over an MPLS network. One of their specialties is hosted PBX or cloud based telephony. The beauty of hosted PBX is that you no longer need make a major capital investment every few years just to expand or improve your in-house telephone system. The expensive and complex switching system is provided as a service over a SIP trunk from Smoothstone to your company.

What’s new is that Smoothstone and Sprint are now partnering to include cell phones and smartphones within the cloud-based telephone system. Users get to have a single phone number, a single voice mail, abbreviated dialing plans and sophisticated group and personal call controls that would normally be available only within the office environment.

What’s tricky about this is to maintain full QoS or Quality of Service controls to ensure that voice services maintain enterprise levels of quality regardless of whether they are being handled wirelessly or through the company’s converged voice and data network. This is where the integration of Smoothstone’s cloud services and Sprint’s 3G, 4G and Global MPLS networks seamlessly manage voice and data communications.

From a user or IT management perspective, the complexity of FMC is moved to the cloud where it is fully managed by the service providers. At the same time, Smoothstone’s other cloud based communications services are available as needed by a single office or a geographically diverse workforce.

Has your company hit a frustration level caused by yesterday’s voice and data networking solutions trying to meet today’s needs? Don’t try to re-engineer and finance a complete overhaul until you look at the options available to you with converged cloud-based voice and data network services. Check pricing and availability with a quick inquiry right now.

PRI Lines For Domestic Call Centers

Domestic call centers have become a popular option for many companies. These range from in-house customer contact centers to independent call centers that contract for the customer service of other businesses. One thing that is common to all call centers is telephone service. The most popular option in telephone service is PRI lines. Let’s see why.

PRI stands for Primary Rate Interface. It is part of the ISDN or Integrated Services Digital Network specification. ISDN was envisioned as a way for all telephone lines to move from analog to digital. The basic service is called BRI or Basic Rate Interface. It offers two phone lines, a phone line and a 64 Kbps data service or a 128 Kbps data service.

ISDN BRI never took off to become the popular small business and residential service that was intended. What happened is that DSL and Cable broadband emerged to deliver much higher bandwidths. Telephone service has made a major transition to cell phones and VoIP. Even so, BRI is still popular, where available, for radio station remote broadcasts & interviews.

ISDN PRI, the big brother to BRI, is now the most popular way to connect to a PBX telephone system for businesses and other organizations. As a digital phone service it is configured into 23 separate digital telephone lines plus a data channel for switching and Caller ID.

PRI service is available just about everywhere. That’s because it was designed to ride on a common 24 channel T1 line provisioned on two twisted pair copper wires. Nearly all businesses have bundled twisted pair cables already installed for multi-line telephone service. A couple of extra pairs can easily be put to use to bring in ISDN PRI, also called T1 PRI.

When businesses get to a size where they need 10 or 12 outside phone lines, it generally makes sense to replace all those separate lines with a single ISDN PRI digital trunk. You don’t need to run a PRI at full capacity. You can save money over analog service by using only half the 23 line capacity.

Most call centers can easily use 23 phone lines. So what do you do when you run out of capacity? That’s easy. Just install a second PRI line and get 23 additional outside lines. The PBX phone equipment used to manage those lines for the agents comes with ISDN PRI connectivity already built-in or easily added with a circuit card. Many circuit cards can handle up to 4 PRI lines for a total of 92 outside lines. Larger systems can handle multiple interface cards.

How can those lines be configured? That’s up to you. The lines can be set up to handle any combination of local, long distance, incoming only, outgoing only, incoming & outgoing calls, toll free numbers, and DID or Direct Inward Dialing that gives every phone its own unique number.

The competition to ISDN PRI lines is SIP trunking. Both types of line services will work with either conventional PBX or the newer IP PBX telephone systems. Which is optimum for the call center connectivity you need? Get customized pricing and availability of digital phone line service for your business location so you can make the best decision.