According to Webopedia, T-1 or Trunk Line One is a dedicated phone connection supporting data rates of 1.544Mbits per second. A T-1 line consists of 24 individual channels, each of which supports 64Kbits per second. Each 64Kbit/second channel can be configured to carry voice or data traffic.

Within the communications world, trunking is analogous to the structure of a tree with one trunk and many branches. According to Wikipedia, this is exactly how trunking got its name. Trunking is a concept by which a communications system can provide network access to many clients by sharing a set of lines or frequencies instead of providing them individually.

T-1 lines are a popular leased line option for businesses connecting to the Internet and for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) connecting to the Internet backbone. Here are some more facts for your review:

• T-1 transmits digital signals instead of analog.
• T-1 connections are available in US, Japan and South Korea, while E-1 connections are available in Europe.
• T-1 PRI offers 23 channels and 1 additional channel to pass data such as Caller ID and improve performance. T-1 PRI is often used for call centers.
• A Bonded T1 is two T1 lines offering 3.0 Mbps of bandwidth.
• A T-1 line is either made of fiber or copper and T1 is being replaced by Fiber to the x (FTTx) technologies, which is a generic term for any broadband network architecture that uses optical fiber to replace all or part of the usual metal local loop used for last mile telecommunications.

Inphonite, LLC develops and markets professional, automated phone messaging systems and interactive computer telephony products that improve the profitability and productivity of a wide range of organizations. InphoniteVoice supports Digital, Analog and VoIP connections.

• Converging your local, long distance and broadband Internet services onto a single pipe with dynamic bandwidth allocation
• Reduce toll charges on long distance calls and eliminate them on local and on-network calls
• Reduce hardware costs and leverage your existing legacy system investment with seamless integration
• Leverage dynamic bandwidth allocation to maximize your network
• Instantly, incrementally and infinitely scale your business communications as demand dictates
• Bring all of your communication needs into one location with one bill and one point of contact.
• Choose DIDs from anywhere in the country and serve them to the central PBX simply and efficiently

As an office clerk of a local school you have a lot of kids to keep track of. Once the teachers turn in their attendance notes, you need to call all the parents that haven’t already called in and let them know their child is absent. If you reach them, you need to ask if their child is home sick or has a valid excuse for being out. If you don’t reach them, you may need to call another number, or series of numbers and leave several messages.

Imagine this, set up InphoniteVoice to say, “Your child is absent today. If they are ill, we need to know their symptoms, so we can keep the rest of the students safe. To leave a message and confirm they are home ill or explain another reason for an excused absence, please press “1.” If you prefer to speak directly to the attendance clerk, please press “0” now.”

Your attendance duties are done and you can move on to other things.

This concludes my series of posts and ideas of when to use InphoniteVoice for Emergency or Blast Notifications. I hope to have shed some light on the amazing capacity and flexibility of a program such as InphoniteVoice.

As stated in an earlier post, I'm sure you can come up with your own scenarios. Unfortunately for this writer's friends, while I took a break from blogging, a local Tucson neighborhood experienced flooding. How useful might InphoniteVoice have been, if the Neighborhood Association, or City were able to warn our friends to evacuate. With InphoniteVoice as an in-house solution, the power to do so, could have been directly in their hands. And therein, is another scenario. Do you have one?

• According to AT&T, commercial touch tone telephones were previewed at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair.
• The Bell System was the sponsor of Disneyland’s Circle-Vision theater in the late 1960’s. After viewing a 360° movie entitled America the Beautiful, guests were welcomed to a hands-on demonstration on the speed of touch tone dialing versus rotary dialing.
• SugarLoaf’s 1975 hit Don't Call Us, We'll Call You included the sound of a touch tone phone dialing two phone numbers – one an unlisted CBS number and the second a public number to the White House. According to Wikipedia, this was a practical joke on CBS Records for turning down the band for a recording contract.

A young woman rushes into the campus police having just been attacked. InphoniteVoice can send out a quick message to everyone on campus to be on the lookout for the assailant. The police can blast a message, “This is a Campus Police Warning. Please be on the lookout for a stocky white male, approximately 5’7” wearing baseball cap and navy sweatpants. Contact campus police at *5555 with any information.”

The entire faculty and student body will know someone amiss is in their midst and can help to apprehend the criminal before they hurt someone else.

What is PBX? :
PBX (Private Branch eXchange) is a privately owned telephone switching system for handling multiple telephone lines without having to pay the phone company to lease each line separately. A PBX essentially takes the place of the phone company's Central Office within the company by acting as the exchange point, routing calls. With a PBX in place, each phone only needs an extension, not a phone number, and the PBX handles all calls made from desk-to-desk within the company.

Currently, there are four distinct scenarios in use:

1. PBX (Private and Circuit Switched)
   See definition above.
2. Hosted/Virtual PBX (Hosted and Circuit Switched)
   PBX is located at and managed by the telephone service provider, and features and calls are delivered via the Internet. You just sign up for a service, rather than buying and maintaining expensive hardware. This essentially removes the branch from the private premises, moving it to a central location.
3. VoIP PBX (Private and Packet Switched)
   Uses the Internet Protocol to carry calls. Companies need packet switched networks for data, so using them for telephone calls was tempting, and the availability of the Internet as a global delivery system made packet switched communications even more attractive.
4. IP Centrex or Hosted/Virtual IP (Hosted and Packet Switched)
   Combination of 2 and 3 above.

History of PBX and How it Can Help You :
Historically, the expense of full-fledged PBX systems has put them out of reach of small businesses and individuals. However, since the 1990s there has been a large set of small, consumer-grade and consumer-size PBXs available. And because of the scenarios above, you have many more choices on what can help your business specifically. Inphonite, LLC develops and markets professional, automated phone messaging systems and interactive computer telephony products that improve the profitability and productivity of a wide range of organizations.

You get to the office and realize you were broken into. You quickly call the Police and realize they won’t be out for at least an hour. After that they will have to do a thorough search, take pictures, measurements, fingerprints and do a lengthy interview. Your employees will be arriving soon, but won’t be allowed in.

You pull out your laptop, log onto InphoniteVoice servers and send a quick text to all employees, “Offices broken into. Please work at home. Will contact you when it’s clear.”

ftp://ftp.inphonite.com/Downloads/InphoniteVoice/ReminderPro-Migration-Tool.zip

1. Automate and Integrate.Outbound IVR makes it easy (and cheap!) to keep in contact with your customers and opt-in prospects through timely and focused messages.
2. User Friendly. An outbound IVR solution can be easy to use, allowing you to focus your creativity on targeting segments of your audience with the right message.
3. Better Insight. All your employees will be better informed and therefore be able to consider what messages should be targeted to what customers.
4. Two heads are better than one! With everyone in the company playing a marketing role and adding their individual experiences and talents to the mix, the end result is superior to that of the lone marketer.
   

• You can select what type of message to send, whether it is via phone, email, text, or even Twitter!
• You can determine the calling windows when messages will be delivered. 
• If you can’t reach the contact at the primary number, the system will recognize this and try the secondary number next time.
• You can create messages utilizing the text-to-speech engine, or the library of professionally recorded phrases, or you can record in your own voice, giving your message that personal touch.
• InphoniteVoice gives you multiple options when sending messages to your contacts, but you can also insert choices for the call recipients, for example, “Press 1 to confirm your appointment; Press 2 to give us two better times to reschedule; Press 3 to leave a message at the tone”. InphoniteVoice also records replies in an inbox so you can hear and review all messages at a convenient time.
  

There are bad germs out there. The CDC is recommending that, “people experiencing flu-like symptoms should stay home.” Two employees already called in saying they were diagnosed with the latest, highly contagious bug. They are staying home, but who knows how many people they have already infected. You can’t afford to have your employees spreading illness further. You’ve already created emergency protocols and the necessary personnel can work from home as needed. It’s better to close the office and ask those select few to work from home.

InphoniteVoice to the rescue. Just pull up your database of employees, grab their cell phone numbers and send a message, “Due to recent CDC notifications and illnesses within our company, we are closing our office for the next seven days. If you have a question, please contact your Manager directly.”

Next, pull up the Managers’ contact information and send a message that, “Emergency protocol is in place. Please work from home for seven days. Your employees have been notified and may contact you. Watch your email for further details.”

You are a store owner and are planning a huge sale to loyal customers. You easily set up InphoniteVoice to call all previous customers in your database to say, “This is Jim’s Store and we are having a tent sale this Friday from 10am till 1pm. Mention this call and you’ll get an additional 10% off your entire purchase. Hope to see you there!”

Your tent sale the next day is a screaming success, and even those customers who haven't been by the store in a while start trickling in throughout the months to follow. By contacting your customers, your store is definitely not a case of "out of sight, out of mind."

You are a doctor’s office and you just received the awaited new vaccine in stock. All of your patients need to know.

You ask your office staff to “call” every patient. They set up InphoniteVoice to say, “This is Dr. Smith’s office calling to let you know that we have the new flu vaccine available. You may come in anytime during office hours. However, there may be a wait. If you prefer to schedule an appointment, press 2 now to speak to the operator, or call 555-555-9876 between 8am and 5pm.”

Your patients start coming in, scheduling and getting vaccinated. You charge a nominal fee. It adds up, and you have healthy patients. As an added bonus, you just contacted those patients that haven’t been in for a long time and some of them call in for check-ups and refer family or friends for vaccines or appointments as well.

• Added the ability to prevent calls from going out if the appointment date is in the past. The setting for this is called "Allow Past Appointments" in the interface server configuration. The default is false – in other words this feature is enabled by default.
• Added indexes to increase database performance.
• Added automatic maintenance feature in the Core Server. Features include automatic database backup, automatic purging of data, automatic cleanup of import files, and automatic cleanup of data files. Configuration for the new maintenance features is contained in the Core Service of the Admin Client.
• Fixed a bug in the Admin Client that, when editing an existing import, it would default to the first (sometimes incorrect import.) It now selects the correct import module.
• Added the report’s header column to the top of every page in the reports.
• Added the ability to customize the name of the attached file name in the automatically generated report subscription emails.
• Added the ability to customize the body of the report email message. Emails templates are automatically extracted to the InphoniteVoice\EmailTemplates folder. If the file exists there it will use that template.
• Added support for desktop lite license.
• Added support for exporting the actual audio of file of the prompt. This allows for inter-installations to copy prompt files.
• Added the ability to backup and restore an account's settings. This new feature is in the Account Settings. Please note, when restoring data, only data that does not exist will be added.
• Added more fine grained security settings and the ability to filter access to an account. Each node in the web client can be completely hidden, granted read only access, read and execute access, or full control. In addition, you can now apply a filter which will cause only data that matches the filter to be shown in the account. For example, you can add a user account that only has access to the Mailbox and filter the data so that only data that matches a custom field will be shown for that user. This scenario allows you to have all of the data sent out through 1 primary account but filter the data such that various user accounts can only see data relevant to their site.
• Added custom schedule support to the outbound rules. This allows for the creation of rules that will call x number of days ahead depending on the day. For example, Monday-Thursday can call 1 day ahead and Friday can call 3 days ahead or Monday-Wednesday can call 2 days ahead, Thursday can call 2 days ahead and Friday can call 4 days ahead. You can create multiple rules each with their own custom schedule.
• Added the ability to filter reports by the status or result. For example, you can now get a report of just “confirm” appointments and another report of just “cancelled” appointments as discreet documents.
• Verified that Pika Monte Carlo version 6.7.0.36 for DSP works with InphoniteVoice. This release from Pika adds official support for Windows 2008 (32-bit) and Windows 7 (32-bit). You can download the updated version from: http://www.pikatechnologies.com/english/View.asp?x=976
• Added the ability to export the queue status to a CSV file.

There have been some big storms rolling through and the one that came through last night was bigger than anyone was expecting. You weren’t prepared for four feet of snow. Most of your employees can’t make it in and you’ve heard of multiple power outages. You know most of your appointments are going to be “no shows” anyway, and at this point it’s probably better to just close the office for the day.

Maybe there are a select few appointments that can be done over the phone instead of in person.

Maybe, if you’re a doctor, you will need to refer patients to a different doctor, or different office.

It’s 6:00 a.m. and your appointments were to start at 7:00. What do you do? You’re at home. You don’t have access to your files with everyone’s contact information. All of your employees are probably snuggled back in bed after they called in unable to make it out through the snow.

Remembering InphoniteVoice, you sit down at your desk, pull up your account, open last night’s calls, make a few edits and set up a blast call saying, “My office is closed due to the weather. Please call 555-555-1212 to reschedule your appointment for later in the week.”

Thinking of that business meeting with the vendor, you select that contact, edit the message and send a direct message tweet saying, “Due to weather I won’t be in the office. Please call 555-555-1213 at our meeting time. I look forward to speaking with you.”

Knowing your first appointment for the day has probably already left for your office, you edit that person and send an SMS message saying, “I’m sorry, our offices are closed due to weather. Let’s reschedule.”

You look at the clock, and it’s only 6:15. Job well done, InphoniteVoice.

The truth is, no one wants an emergency to occur. Our lives would be much smoother without them. However, with InphoniteVoice you can rest assured that those people who need to know something important, will be notified and with InphoniteVoice Reports you can have the proof that they were.

Over the next several weeks, I will share scenarios in which an emergency or blast notification system could be needed and used. When I got to thinking about it though, I realized the uses are endless.

If you’re thinking, “I wonder if we could use an emergency notification system for _blank_,” the answer is probably, “Yes!” Read on, and see why.

Let’s say you need to contact a lot of people at once. How do you do it? In the past, depending on the scenario, you may not have had a lot of options on how to contact a lot of people at once.

LAST WEEK, if your office was closed, you or a colleague may have had to rush down to work and put a note on your door saying that you were closed today. Maybe you would have started calling people to tell them that you needed to reschedule appointments. Or, maybe you don’t have time or can’t get to the office, so people will just show up and the door will be locked.

IN THE PAST, if you wanted to send a brief sales announcement, you might have spent hours creating, printing, folding, and mailing a flyer.

A MONTH AGO, if you needed to evacuate a building, business or hotel, you might have had employees calling everyone, one at a time, or running down the halls telling people to evacuate.

AN HOUR AGO, you might have even paid a small fortune for a radio announcement about the bridge outside of town being closed.

NOW, the ideas above belong to yesterday. InphoniteVoice is a reliable, cost-effective solution. Maybe you already know the benefits of InphoniteVoice as a reminder call system, but did you know it can work at high capacity, making multitudes of contacts within a short time?

If you already use InphoniteVoice for your day-to-day reminder calls you’re one of the lucky ones. With InphoniteVoice you can edit your reminder calls from the night before and cancel your appointments with the click of a few buttons, and you don’t even have to be at the office.

If you don’t have InphoniteVoice doing reminder calls, you can still set up and have ready a state-of-the-art emergency notification system for less than the price of most systems out there.

Read through the scenarios in the coming weeks or come up with your own and InphoniteVoice will cater to your needs.

If you don’t have InphoniteVoice or some other emergency notification service, you owe it to yourself to look into getting one. Should an emergency occur, it is well worth it to be prepared.

• Launched as the steam ship Peralta in 1926.
• Burned to the main deck in an arson fire in 1933.
• Launched in 1935 as the Kalakala, the world’s first streamlined vessel.
• Welcomed to the Washington State Ferry fleet in 1951.
• Retired from service in 1967.
• Converted to a crab-processing vessel for Dutch Harbor, Alaska.
• Converted to process shrimp and floated onto a pre-made bed of sand at Gibson Cove, Kodiak Alaska.
• Repaired, refloated and returned to Elliot Bay in 1998 after a 32 year absence.

• Reduced Upfront Investment. A SaaS application does not require the upfront investment in IT infrastructure that is required for an on-premise solution.

• On-Demand Elasticity. With an on-premise deployment, “You buy it – You keep it.” A SaaS application is easy to scale up or down and your costs scale up or down accordingly.

• Anytime/Anywhere Access. To access a SaaS solution, you simply need a browser and an Internet connection.

• Frequent Product Updates. One of the key benefits of SaaS is frequent product updates and enhancements.

• Economies of Scale. A SaaS solution can become costly versus an on-premise solution if you are sending large numbers of messages daily. This is much like buying pizza by the slice rather than simply buying the whole pizza.

• Security and Control. Many clients prefer to have their data and applications maintained and securely accessible onsite.

• Rapid ROI. Some on-premise solutions have an almost immediate Return on Investment (ROI). For example, an InphoniteVoice on-premise edition often has an ROI of 30 days or less. Once the system has paid for itself, additional messages such as follow-up calls, past-due reminders, or a second reminder call per appointment can be made at virtually no additional cost.

• Emergency Notification. Consider a hospital IT Department that is already making appointment reminder calls via an on-premise edition of InphoniteVoic. Let’s say they want the ability to send Emergency or Mass Notifications to their 2,500 employees. Assuming the system can place 45 calls per channel per hour, it would require 56 channels (phone lines) to call all employees within sixty minutes. Such bandwidth is very expensive and it would remain unused most of the time.

Once configured, the incremental cost to deliver 2,500 messages using InphoniteVoice SaaS is only $350.

• Redundancy. As a backup to your InphoniteVoice on-premise solution, InphoniteVoice SaaS, at a cost of pennies per message, can ensure that your messages are delivered every day.

• Purchase Assurance Plan. A customer may prefer to thoroughly test InphoniteVoice and implement the SaaS version before purchasing an on-premise edition. To facilitate this, Inphonite will apply 100% of the InphoniteVoice SaaS implementation fee toward the purchase price of an On-Premise edition for up to 12 months after purchase. We will also implement the migration at no additional charge.

• Register to vote
• Update your address
• Order and pay for a duplicate drivers license and even express delivery
• Renew your car registration
• Request a Restricted Use 3-Day Permit online and print it on your home computer. (A Restricted Use 3-Day Permit allows the operation of an unregistered vehicle for purposes such as vehicle inspection or emissions testing.)