by admin | Jan 22, 2017 | Features of Voip
This is one of a series of posts about features that many VoIP providers claim cannot be done. We’re doing them.
When you replace your old phone system with a new hosted PBX or cloud-based service, be sure you don’t just assume that all the good features of your old system will be available with the new one. There’s a few features that are not automatically implemented in a VoIP system; it takes the ability to write software to make these things work, and most VoIP providers do not have that capability. Lots of folks are falling into this trap because it seems so obvious that a brand-new system using new technology must be able to anything a 30-year-old clunker can do. Well, we think so too – but all VoIP providers aren’t on the same page. Check it out before you sign that contract!
One of the most common “old system envy” features is Call Parking. You have a caller on the line, and you want to put that call on hold and have someone else pick it up. “Call for you on Line 2”, right? The other person sees a red light on Line 2 on their phone, presses the button, and picks up the call.
The thing about a hosted or cloud-based PBX system is, the phone lines are not connected to your phones at all. The connection to the telephone network happens at the service provider’s network center. Your phones are connected to the provider’s system via a digital network connection, not a phone line. So there is no button on your phone that connects directly to a phone line. Each phone has its own collection of “lines”, which are channels into the provider’s system, not direct connections out to the phone network. So when your phone’s Line 2 rings and you pick up the call, and my Line 2 rings and I pick up the call, you and I are not on the same line. You’ve got your Line 2 and I’ve got mine, and they are not the same line. So although you can place a call on hold, I can’t pick that call up on my phone because it’s on hold on your Line 2, not mine.
VoIP systems usually do have the ability to park a call. This means placing the call into a parking lot that is managed by the hosted system, not your phone. When you park a call it disappears from your phone completely. Anyone in your office can pick up their phone, dial a special set of codes, and retrieve that call.
The hiccup is: the process of parking a call and unparking is almost always in one of two categories: either it requires a ridiculously complex sequence of codes and pushbuttons, or it cannot be done at all on a system with multiple companies because there is no mechanism for separating your parked calls from those of your service provider’s customers. Because of these issues, VoIP providers commonly just say they cannot provide this capability at all.
At Red Road Telecom we solved this problem by writing the needed software to implement parking lots for our customers, keeping them completely separate; and we’ve made the process of parking and picking up a call as simple as it used to be last century.
You park a call by pushing two buttons: Transfer and Park. The Park button starts blinking red and the call is no longer connected to your phone, it’s in the system parking lot that’s dedicated to your company. That same park button starts blinking red on all of your phones. To pick up the call, you just press that blinking red button. We provide up to 16 Park buttons for each customer, so you can have the equivalent of 16 lines shared across all your phones for parking and unparking calls.
If your business has multiple locations you can share parking spaces across locations if that works for you, or you can assign a separate set of parking spaces to each location. If you share them, that means that, for example, you can park a call on a phone on Maui and I can pick up that call by pressing the blinking red button on my phone in Los Angeles.
Features like Call Parking make a big difference in your staff’s comfort level and enjoyment of your new phone system, and that’s going to show up in the bottom line one way or the other!
by admin | Mar 14, 2016 | Tech Insights
We get this question a lot, especially from fax machine vendors, sometimes from credit-card terminal vendors as well. They will generally tell the customer that their equipment doesn’t work well with digital phone lines, and they need to get an analog phone line.
All phone lines are both analog and digital. The difference is: where does the conversion take place? For a standard analog phone line (POTS – Plain Old Telephone Service), the conversion takes place at the Central Office (“CO”) operated by your local old-fashioned phone company. The line from your fax machine to the CO is analog – it’s a pair of copper wires. At the CO, the signal is converted to digital and transmitted via the PSTN (public switched telephone network), which uses the same underlying technology as the Internet to transmit the data to the CO nearest the destination phone or fax machine. At that remote CO, it’s converted again to analog and sent along the final stretch (called the “Last Mile”) to the phone or fax machine or whatever is connected to that phone number.
With a VoIP system, the conversion also takes place at the other end of a pair of copper wires; the difference is, that other end is in your office. It’s an analog adapter that converts voice signals to data signals and back again, very similarly to the way the phone switch at the CO does.
So why do so many vendors think you have to have a POTS line for a fax, postage meter, or alarm? Because many VoIP vendors do not do a very good job of configuring or conditioning their equipment to work properly with these analog devices. In fairness, that’s not a simple task. All of these devices require a real-time connection without gaps or static or echos. Getting that to happen reliably over the open Internet, which nearly all VoIP vendors use for their telephone service, is extremely difficult.
The best solutions use a combination of excellent end-user equipment, smart software, dedicated circuits (or at least VPNs – Virtual Private Networks) between the end user and the hosted services provider, and cleverly adjusted combinations of parameters at both ends to get the effect of a continuous real-time communication even when the underlying connection is not that way. The VoIP designer for one of the largest service providers told me “Fax is a dark art; it’s the occult science of VoIP.”.
Of course the bottom line is: it’s gotta work. So make sure your provider is either able to make your analog device communicate flawlessly over their VoIP system, or be willing to install a POTS line at no additional cost if that’s what it takes.
by admin | Mar 14, 2016 | Tech Insights
Most network devices come with a RESET button. Routers, wireless access points, some phones, switches – all of these and more. It’s kind of natural for someone to press this button when they think there’s a problem with the device. Sometimes a tech support person will tell you to restart the device, and pressing the RESET button looks like a way to do that. Most field techs (including ours) make sure to have at least one Telecom Device Reset Tool (aka “paper clip”) in their tool kits.
So, why am I saying you should never press this button? Let’s look at what the RESET button actually does. A network device has a bunch of internal settings that control how the device connects to the network, how you log in to it, and the details of its operation. As it comes out of the box, the device will have a collection of known, default settings that you can use to log in to it for the first time and configure it for your particular requirements. These default settings are stored permanently in the device, and when you press the RESET button, they override any changes you may have made and reset the device to the “factory original” settings.
If a device stops working while it’s in service, it’s often because of a bug in the internal software. The internal memory fills up, or the CPU freezes, or just one critical feature (like routing) stops working. In those cases, rebooting the device will often clear up the problem temporarily. If it really is a bug in the software, then it’ll happen again and again need a reboot.
Restoring the device to factory settings is very, very unlikely to cure these problems. Unless someone just logged in to the device and changed the settings, the settings cannot be the cause of the device suddenly failing. What does happen is that the reboot that occurs as part of doing the factory reset also clears the problem. Temporarily.
But restoring the factory settings has another result: all of the settings that configured the device for your network are now gone. If those settings are the same as the default settings, then there is no point in pressing the RESET button,it won’t change anything. If, on the other hand, the working settings are not the defaults, then when you press the RESET button you are wiping out all of the correct settings, which will prevent the device from working. So, don’t ever press the RESET button, just reboot the device if that’s what you’re trying to do. Unplug the power, wait a sec, plug it back in again.
Like any good rule, this one has an exception. There is one situation in which it does make sense to push the “RESET” button. You are an IT person (or you’re working with one), you cannot log in to the device (it’s frozen completely, or you don’t know the password), and you know how to program it correctly for the network it’s attached to. If that’s not you, stay away from RESET!
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