Do You Use Call Accounting to Understand Infrastructure Needs?
March 26, 2015
By Susan J. Campbell
TMCnet Contributing Editor
How in-depth do you get when evaluating your telecommunications spend? Do you use call accounting to track all expenses and hold departments accountable for their activities? Or, do you simply pay the bills that come in without checking to see if there are errors, services paid for but no longer used or other glaring problems? If this is you, you’re not alone. You have a lot to do throughout the day and you assume your providers are keeping track.
The good news is you have access to more than just information when it comes to managing your communications network. For a number of organizations, this information is available through the traditional communications architecture, which can create disparity in operations and costs. The variety of individual PBXs that tend to be involved, as well as a combination of T1 and POTS can create tracking challenges without effective call accounting methods.
As the industry continues to evolve, companies are increasingly looking to new architecture structures focused on SIP to leverage technology that will yield the desired reduction in costs and increase in capabilities. Such a change also means moving away from well-worn methods of traffic engineering where calculations were based on Erlang B and Erlang C. As highlighted in a recent post by call accounting solutions provider ISI (News - Alert), SIP changed the way communications infrastructure needed to be designed.
To ensure the proper engineering of the network at each deployment stage, IT directors need to calculate the number of concurrent voice channels needed. Such calculations must be completed for both PSTN and on-net calling. Too often, these numbers are not a calculation at all, but a guess by well-meaning individuals who simply don’t have enough information. This lack of information, however, can lead to the assumption that four POTS lines in the past means the company needs four SIP circuits today, which can lead to the deployment of the wrong system.
For instance, such an assumption doesn’t consider the number of actual concurrent calls required by the business at a busy hour. It also doesn’t take into consideration the existing traffic on the PSTN lines that will be sent over the WAN and become the on-net traffic or how much actual Internet bandwidth is required to support projected activity. Instead, assumptions need to be educated decisions based on actual data captured from calling patterns, information generally captured in your call accounting processes.
If you’re not tracking this information now, it’s time to examine the call accounting solutions available to you and avoid making a costly mistake while trying to improve your communications infrastructure.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi