Given that many business operations would grind to a halt if their telecommunications services developed a significant fault, or failed altogether, the importance of a reliable and high quality voice network cannot be understated. Given this fact, below are some fundamental requirements of a high quality voice network, which should be considered before contracting with any supplier of telecommunications service. Read more
In the modern era people have become accustomed to having their call answered by an automated IVR (Interactive Voice Response) Menu when they call any large organisation that uses a call centre to answer their inbound calls. The reason why such organisations implement and use this type technology, is to obtain significant improvements in their operational efficiency by having the caller provide information, such as the nature of their query, before their call is connected to a call centre agent. If a caller is able to navigate through a series of options in order to specify the reason for their call, it will save a considerable amount of time when compared to the amount of time it would take a call centre agent to do the same thing live on the call. More recently, this concept has been taken a step further through the introduction of speech recognition to further improve operational efficiency by increasing the amount of information that can be collected before a call is connected. Read more
A Codec is a technical term for the following variations, which essentially mean the same thing: compression - decompression / compressor - decompressor / Code Decode. In practice the compression and decompression is done by a computer program for the purpose of transmitting data over a data connection and allows them to be translated when they reach their destination. Within the telecommunications industry, the data transmitted through the Codec would be the packets of data that make up a call. Read more
The Telephone Preference Service, or TPS, is an 'opt-out' register which prevents individuals from receiving unsolicited marketing calls. It's a free and extremely useful service used by a huge number of people - an estimated 17 million - to avoid these inconvenient calls, even being put to use by companies. This is thanks to the fact that the Corporate Telephone Preference Service (CTPS) was set up in June 2004, giving corporate businesses and organisations the chance to opt-out of being on the receiving end of unsolicited market calls. Also the legal definition of 'individual' includes SoleTraders and Partnerships (excluding Scotland), and so these have had the opportunity to register onto the TPS since May 1999. That is when the Telecommunications (Data Protection and Privacy) Regulations1999 came into action, allowing people to register to the list. The British direct marketing industry administers the list on behalf of Ofcom. Read more
The Information Commissioner's Office is the UK's independent authority, which has been set up to uphold information rights in the public interest, in order to promote openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals. With particular regards to the ICO's role in call centre regulation, the ICO are responsible for enforcing regulation in respect of marketing calls through the telephone preference service. Read more
A SIP Trunk is a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) service which streams media based on the Session Initiation Protocol. SIP is often used to control voice and video calls or other communication sessions over Internet Protocol. The protocol can be used to both create and terminate sessions, or modify them whether they be unicast or multicast or over one or several media streams. Instant messaging and online games also use SIP. Read more
ISDN is an acronym of Integrated Services Digital Network, which can be defined as a series of communication standards that allows the simultaneous digital transmission of data, voice, and other services over the public switched telephone network. The introduction of ISDN technology represented a move from analogue connectivity to digital, which offered significant improvements in quality. Although SIP (session initiation protocol) has been around for several years, it is only recently that advances in technology that have now made SIP an viable alternative to ISDN. The purpose of this article is to explore whether a business should replace ISDN with SIP. Read more
A SIP trunk is the use of SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) to set up communications over the Internet between a customer location and an Internet telephony service provider (ITSP), which transfers the SIP calls to the PSTN. Unlike in traditional telephony, where bundles of physical wires were once delivered from the service provider to a business, a SIP trunk is a logical connection from one point to another over the Internet. Read more
