Back To Basics – Your Telecom System

One of Teledata Select’s goals is to be your Telecom IT resource as you make decisions on the future of your  telecommunication service. While we understand that office technology is not your core competency, it is helpful to have a basic understanding of how office telecommunications work in order to understand how to best put it to work for you.  To that end, here is a high level overview on modern office telecom technology.

That was then

We don’t have to go too far back into the good ol’ days to recall when a phone was a phone. Dial a number and the telephone company routed it through their offices based on the digits dialed. This is what is called POTS. Plain Old Telephone Service. A simple and reliable service that powered business (and home) communication for a very long time.  Add an answering machine and a Fax and you were on top of the world.

This is now

It would be an understatement to say that everything changed with the advent of the internet in the mid 90’s. While there are still reasons to have a POTS line, the Internet is really what powers Telecommunication now.

As long as your broadband connection is big enough, it can now effortlessly support phone calls, email, video conferencing, streaming content, messaging, file sharing. secure remote office connections. Bandwidth is only part of the solution though. The hardware and software needs to be in place to reliably, simply and securely support all the services that will use this bandwidth.

For example, making a typical phone call over the internet requires that the voice gets converted to a digital signal that then goes through network routers, switches and various other network devices before getting converted back to sound for the intended receiver. This is basically the same whether it is to call across the office or across the globe. The only real difference is how much hardware the call traverses and how the distance affects the sound quality.

As mentioned above, there are a lot of telecommunications applications available to businesses now. They also use a lot of bandwidth and require hardware sized to support the increased traffic. To support this, a business would need to budget for the initial build out of this infrastructure and the ongoing support and maintenance. The hard part is building scalability and support into the design and budget. An alternative to this build-out effort and expense is to use one of the many vendors that provide off site telecommunications services at a comparatively cheaper cost.

As a Telecom Service broker, Teledata Select has built strong relationships with these vendors and can be your agent in getting your business a telecommunication solution that meets your needs today and into the future. Contact us for more information or a free analysis of your telecom system.