Glossary
DR: Disaster Recovery – The tools and plans for business continuity after a natural disaster or other type event. IE: data backup and employee communications. Telecommunications are very susceptible to interruption and a good DR plan is essential to continuing your business after a disaster.
Follow-the-Sun: Calls to a call center are automatically routed to people in specific geographic locations depending on the time of day, making it possible for calls to be answered at any time without having overnight shifts.
Hosted PBX: Telovations’ Hosted PBX is a service made available to customers and accessible through a private, high-speed connection. Because Hosted PBX is housed in a secure location, the service is always available. Also, as a hosted service, Telovations maintains the system and provides all upgrades as part of the service.
IP: Internet Protocol – A standard describing software that keeps track of the Internet’s addresses for different nodes, routes messages and allows packets to cross multiple networks on the way to the final destination.
Managed: Your connection is monitored and traffic prioritized to provide the best level of service.
MPLS: MultiProtocol Label Switching - Data packets are assigned labels so packet-forwarding decisions are made solely on the contents of this label, without the need to examine the packet itself. This allows end-to-end circuits to be created across any type of transport medium, using any protocol.
NOC: Network Operations Center – A central location for monitoring the status of a network, coordinating network maintenance, providing user support and accumulating network usage data.
PBX: Private Branch Exchange - a telephone exchange that serves a particular business or office, as opposed to one that a telephone company operates. PBXs make connections among the internal telephones of the business, and also connect them to the PSTN via trunk lines.
POTS: Plain Old Telephone Service
PSTN: Public Switched Telephone Network
Real-Time: Data is being processed immediately, not BATCH processed. In voice and video communications Real-Time is extremely important so there is no perceived delay in the conversation.
SIP (Session Initiation Protocol): SIP is the most important standard for setting up telephone calls, multimedia conferencing, instant messaging and other types of real-time communications on the Internet.
SIP Trunking: Connection to the traditional PSTN network provided by a Service Provider allowing IP communications not only within the company. Unlike in traditional telephony, where bundles of physical wires were once delivered from the service provider to a business, a SIP trunk allows a company to replace these traditional fixed PSTN lines with PSTN connectivity via a SIP trunking service provider on the Internet.
SIP trunks can offer significant cost-savings for enterprises, eliminating the need for local PSTN gateways, costly ISDN BRIs (Basic Rate Interfaces) or PRIs (Primary Rate Interfaces).
UM: Unified Messaging – Receiving all of your messages, e-mail, voice mail and faxes in one in-box. Also know as UC, Unified Communications.
VoIP: Voice over Internet Protocol – Voice is encoded and transmitted in packets over a data network instead of the traditional PSTN.