Office Telesystems Product Offerings

Office Telesystems Products and How We Chose Them

Office Telesystems has carefully chosen the very best Unified Communications and UCaaS products on the market today, including new cloud/hosted VoIP, on premise VoIP and digital phone systems, audio visual systems, overhead paging systems, used phone systems, structured voice, data and video cabling and many more products designed to enhance communications in your office. We've recently expanded our product lines with audio visual and enhanced overhead paging options to enhance your voice communications to a new level. Our product lines are under constant evaluation to maintain the standards you deserve and expect with today's technology.

Our product lines have been chosen to provide a combination of the latest technology, proven reliability and eliminating issues with equipment obsolescence.  Well known product names such as NEC, Avaya, Mitel, and NetFortris/Fonality cloud VoIP are all phone system products focused on providing solutions that offer rapid ROI, low total cost of ownership and long term investment advantages. John Cornwell, CEO of Office Telesystems, had this to say about our product lines: "After 37 years in the industry, I've worked with just about every equipment manufacturer in telecommunications. I've seen a few come and go as well. Our product lines provide our customers a reliable solution poised to keep up with new technology, provide long term investment benefits and low total cost of ownership. Today's Unified Communications implemented with UCaaS and our premise based offerings are tools for enhancing productivity and profitability, an investment in your business."  

Though we carry several products that fit Mr. Cornwell's statement, he also knows that customer service is what wins the day with today's customer. "Providing a great product and great support after the sale is what today's business executive and IT department is looking for". Providing both is top priority at Office Telesystems!

Thank you for your time! Office Telesystems serves the Dallas Fort Worth area, and nationwide for enterprise business and hotel motel. Visit us at www.officetelesystems.com or call toll free (844) 544-4900, (972) 484 4900 in Dallas or (817) 529-1700 in Fort Worth for more information.

SIP Trunk Service. What are SIP Trunks?

SIP Trunk Service

SIP Trunks are a VoIP phone line technology which can give you great sound quality and new features not available with analog lines or even PRI service. Office Telesystems can provide SIP trunks along with high speed internet for your office.

SIP trunks are a VoIP delivered call path designed to provide reduced cost and more features for your phone system. Cloud VoIP phone systems utilize this technology to provide voice services from their cloud server to a cloud VoIP customer. Premise based phone systems of today can accommodate SIP trunks as well, which can be delivered to your office through your internet service as a bundled service. Here are some advantages to SIP trunk service from your voice line provider:

• Improved clarity of calls
• Save money on your bill in most cases
• Better conference call sound quality, 3 or more parties
• Direct dial numbers for all extensions are available with SIP trunks
• SIP can provide 1 to 250 call paths or more for all phone numbers
• Modify your outbound caller ID to your callers to whatever call back number you want to show
• Set up your line access to your desktop endpoints any way you want
• Along with call reporting software, utilize DID numbers for ad campaigns to help determine which media is the most valuable.
• Switching your PRI or analog lines to SIP may save you enough money monthly to justify a lease payment on a new VoIP phone system in many cases. SIP comes with your cloud based VoIP system.

Office Telesystems works with many of the major voice carriers in the area and can help you implement SIP trunks on your premise based VoIP system, or provide a cloud based VoIP solution for your offices. Talk to one of our expert sales team to find out which solution is the best fit for your company.

Thank you for your time!

Codec Types

What's a Codec?

A codec, which stands for coder-decoder, converts an audio signal (your voice) into compressed digital form for transmission (VoIP) and then back into an uncompressed audio signal for replay. It's the essence of VoIP. Codecs vary in the sound quality, the bandwidth required, the computational requirements, etc. Each service, program, phone, gateway, etc., typically supports several different codecs, and when talking to each other, negotiate which codec they will use.

Little Known Fact - You can assign a different codec to individual phones. Your staff can use medium quality/low bandwidth G.729 codec while the boss and legal department uses the superior quality/heavy bandwidth G.722 codec.

Common VoIP Codec Protocols

G.729  G.729 is a codec that has low bandwidth requirements but provides good audio quality. This is the most commonly used codec in VoIP calling and has a MOS rating of 4.0

G.711 G.711 is a codec that was introduced by ITU in 1972 for use in digital telephony. With only a 1:2 compression and a 64K bitrate for each direction (128K plus some overhead), it is best used where there is a lot of bandwidth available. G.711 has a MOS rating of 4.2

G.722 G.722 is a high bit rate (48/56/64Kbps) ITU standard codec which, because it is of even better quality of the traditional public switched telephone network (PSTN), it can be used for a variety of higher quality speech applications. This standard also requires an adequate amount of bandwidth and usually rates a 5.0 on the MOS scale.

Summary

There are many codecs out there, some like the G.711 are royalty free, others require licensing (which is often included in the gateways). Some that we haven't mentioned here drive the wholesale movement of voice traffic among the carriers and are used for specialty applications. And to make it a bit more confusing, they all contain variations within their own specification.

How to Decide? 

The codecs that provide the best quality consume the most data bandwidth, thus there is a trade-off that you need to consider.  The easiest way is to ascertain, on a phone by phone basis, whether you want the voice conversation to be:

• Slightly less then the quality of an excellent cell phone call (G.729)
• Equal to the quality of an analog land-line today (G.711)
• Better than the public switched telephone network for voice critical applications (G.722)

Telephone Systems Service and Customer Experience

Telephone Systems Service and Customer Experience

The success of your business may hinge on offering a high quality customer service experience. Your telephone systems service company can have a direct impact on your ability to service your customers. The latest technology in phone systems, such as cloud/hosted VoIP, premise based VoIP systems and even today's digital systems offer an impressive collection of features that will offer the best customer service operations available. Without diligent staff training, though, even the most robust collection of phone systems features will not do you any good. Office Telesystems offers a thorough training experience after your systems installation to allow you to maximize the benefits available in your investment.

Training staff to operate telephone systems features, including customer service integration, are important training topics. While basic etiquette is a requirement for anyone operating phones, there are advanced training topics that can take customer service agents from good to excellent. Their performance will directly reflect the customer satisfaction your business needs to offer in order to stay competitive.

Because auto-attendants can do so much of the call answering for administrative staff, they are at risk of losing the best phone manners in their greeting. Customers can begin to feel quantity of calls is more important than quality. Training administrative staff for short but properly worded greetings with a friendly customer service voice will help retain a warm customer oriented phone experience.  

Basic phone etiquette topics might seem remedial for some staff members, but it is amazing how many basic manners are ignored in a busy office environment. Some rules that should be reviewed during your telephone system training should at least lightly assess those topics. Some of these rules would be to refrain from eating or chewing gum while on the phone. Another important topic is how to hang up the phone properly. When operators, administrators, or customer service agents set the phone into its cradle firmly, many customers feel as if they were rudely hung up on.

An effective exercise for telephone systems service customer experience training is to practice active listening skills. Staff that can respond effectively in a variety of customer service situations will create winning situations for your business. Make sure they know the proper procedure for always asking permission before they place someone on hold and show appreciation for customers that have had to hold during a phone call. You may also have specific questions that you want every customer service agent to ask callers or information they need to relay. Including those items in training and practicing, those items will assure that your staff is going to help your business reputation grow for great customer and client experiences.

Office Telesystems understands that you have the very latest and best in telephone system technology in your office, but if it is not properly utilized and your staff is not properly trained, your investment will provide a fraction of its worth. Contact one of our expert sales representatives today to learn more about our products and services. 844 544 4900 toll free, or call 972 484 4900 or 817 529 1700. You can also visit our website at www.officetelesystems.com.

QoS and VoIP, Why Is It So Important?

QoS and VoIP: Why Is It So Important?

Internet service has many functions in today's world. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), in many cases, uses the same bandwidth you may be using for visiting websites, downloading files, email and more. When these functions happen simultaneously, it can slow down your internet speed, and you could even drop VoIP calls.

Quality of Service (QoS) is technology's answer to that issue. On data networks, QoS is a feature that allows certain types of traffic to take priority over others. With this, QoS is vital in today's VoIP-driven office environment, as some types of phone or video calls over your internet service require the need to take priority over others.
The type of behaviors that are given priority can vary greatly, depending on the organizations setting the rules. At Office Telesystems, all VoIP systems, including multi office VoIP solutions require QoS enabled networks to ensure the quality call and video traffic.

Data networks weren't originally built to handle voice traffic, due to the nature of packet transportation that takes place. As mentioned, QoS allows an organization to decide what traffic take highest priority.
For VoIP or video calling, you should have voice calls set as top priority to ensure calls are not dropped due to increased internet traffic in your office. Without QoS, offices can suffer from poor voice and video conferencing quality.

Which Factors Affect Call Quality?

There are three major factors affecting call quality over a VoIP system.

• Latency - This refers to the slight delay in packet delivery. Callers generally report round-trip voice delays of 250 milliseconds or more.
• Jitter - Because of unpredictable changes in a network, there can be a variation in the delay of packet receipt, which can lead to dropout.
• Packet Loss - Also known as Data Loss, packet loss can be caused by high congestion. The result is degradation in audio quality.

How to Improve Your QoS

There are some things your business can do to improve your VoIP phone systems call quality, starting with checking with your ISP (internet service provider) to make sure you have the best plan possible.
A high-quality Internet connection is essential to the quality of your VoIP calls. You may find it necessary to change to a new provider if your current one doesn't offer a plan that can handle the daily transfer load.

• Check Your Router - First, make sure you have a QoS-enabled router and, if not, get a new one right away. If you have an existing router that supports QoS and it's not enabled, you should enable it immediately.
• Improve Your Contention Ratio - The contention ratio refers to the number of users configured to use each unit of data capacity. You want this ratio to be as low as possible—a 5:1 ratio means only five users are sharing one unit of data capacity, while a 50:1 ratio creates a much greater strain.
• Limit Use During Important Calls - In larger organizations, this obviously isn't a possibility, but for smaller businesses and startups, it can be a great solution. When an important VoIP call or video conference is scheduled, ask everyone to refrain from high-bandwidth activities like streaming video or uploading large files.

Quality of Service is an important issue to businesses that rely on their networks for a VoIP system, whether cloud VoIP or a multi office premise based VoIP system. As VoIP continues to replace traditional telephony in businesses, a top-quality, QoS-enabled VoIP design is more important than ever. By ensuring you have a QoS enabled router, a business can ensure its VoIP system is optimized to handle its daily voice traffic.

If you are looking for a cloud VoIP system (hosted) or premise based VoIP system for your one office or more, see our Products page on our website and request a quote, or simply call (972) 484 4900 or (817) 529-1700. Toll free (844) 544 4900.

Managed PoE Network Switches and VLAN. VoIP Essentials!

Network Switches for VoIP, VLAN Tagging

When implementing a cloud or premise based VoIP system in a single or multi office environment, utilize managed PoE network switches with VLAN for VoIP network integration. These managed PoE network Switches are used for creating VLAN tagging with a VoIP phone system.With VLANs, you can separate network traffic (such as VoIP and standard network traffic) and users for specific reasons such as applying different security or policies to different VLANs or groups of users. For VoIP, there are specific benefits in separating data and voice traffic on the network. One benefit is that QoS can be applied to the voice traffic via VLAN tagging (also see our QoS blog). VLAN tags are used to provide high priority to voice packets. Using a VLAN for VoIP also prevents VoIP devices from competing with other traffic on the network, helping to avoid delays in delivering voice packets and providing maximum quality on VoIP calls. A VoIP VLAN also makes it easier to troubleshoot VoIP issues since the VoIP traffic is isolated. This practice should be implemented for both cloud VoIP and premise based VoIP phone systems.

We recommend that our customers consult their own IT staff or vendor about the best way to implement VoIP technology and how it will impact the existing network infrastructure. Contact Office Telesystems for more information at (972) 484-4900 in Dallas and (817) 529-1700 in Tarrant County. Toll Free (844) 544 4900.

www.officetelesystems.com