Telephone Systems Knowledge Base

  • What is PRI or Primary Rate Interface?
    • A 1.544 megabit Dynamic circuit with 23 voice or data paths designed to provide businesses with fully digital circuitry, Direct Inward Dialing, and High Speed Data.
  • What is ACD or Automatic Call Distribution?
    • A system that automatically distributes incoming telephone calls to a specific telephone set or group of telephone sets based on characteristics of the call. Provides company with detailed information on agent activity, time of day, day of week calling patterns.
  • What is IVR or Integrated Voice Response?
    • IVR is a process of automatically interacting with a caller through providing audio prompts to request information and store responses from the caller. IVR’s are used by call centers , banks, service organizations, as a means to help process more calls with minimal times and personnel.
  • What is VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol?
    • VoIP is used to transmit voice conversations over a data network using Internet Protocol. VoIP is ideal for companies with home and remote offices.
  • What is SIP – Session Initiation Protocol?
    • SIP is a signaling protocol, widely used for controlling multimedia communication sessions such as voice and video calls over Internet Protocol (IP). The SIP protocol is a TCP/IP-based application layer protocol. Other feasible application examples include video conferencing, instant messaging and presence information.
  • What is POTS or Plain Old Telephone Service?
    • This old term relates to a basic telephone line such as the one in your house or a fax machine. It is a standard 56K line that offers minimal features.
  • What is a trunk?
    • A communications circuit that interconnects switches. As such, multiple users and multiple transmissions can share a trunk on a pooled basis, with contention for trunk access managed by an intelligent switching device. There are many types of trunks. Tie trunks connect Private Branch Exchange (PBX) switches in a private network, Central Office Exchange (COE) trunks connect PBXs to telephone company central office exchange switches, and interoffice trunks interconnect central office exchange switches. Trunk groups are groups of trunks serving the same special purpose.Trunks traditionally are directional in nature, with the options being one-way outgoing (originating), one-way incoming (terminating), or twoway (combination).The term trunk comes from the Latin truncus, literally meaning something cut off. Trunk distinguishes the main body of a circuit from the lesser subsidiary lines that come off it, much as the main channel of a river is apart from its lesser tributaries.
  • What is PBX or Private Branch Exchange?
    • A voice-optimized switching system physically located on the customer premises, serving the internal station-to-station communications requirements of one or more user organizations and with trunk circuits connecting to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) via one or more central office (CO) switches, and perhaps one or more other PBXs composing a private network.
  • What is convergence?
    • In telecommunications, the coming together of voice, facsimile, data, video, and image applications, systems, and networks, both wireline and wireless.
  • What is latency?
    • Delay.The total time required for a signal to travel from one point to another, generally from a transmitter through a network to a receiver.
  • What is Unified Communications?
    • Unified Communications (UC) is the integration of the full range of real-time communications products, services and features - telephony, email, voicemail, speech to text, instant messaging, faxes and much more - into a consolidated communications user interface. Unified Communications allows an individual to send a message on one medium and receive the same communication on another medium.