Call Accounting Featured Article

Trunking Analysis Delivers Availability, Cost Savings

  By Paula Bernier, Executive Editor, TMC

On the surface, a body of water may seem simple and serene. But beneath the surface, you will probably find that it’s teeming with life and constant change.

The same is true of your communications trunks. That’s why you may want to consider tapping the trunking analysis capabilities of a call accounting solution.

Trunking analysis provides the visibility your organization needs to take a deep dive into usage events and trends.

This call accounting feature can allow you to see usage based on the hour, day, or month. It can allow you to measure your baseline, so you know if your existing trunks can support new applications or marketing campaigns, for example.

Trunk analysis helps you forecast and plan, so you have adequate trunking capacity for future events and needs – providing an assist in ensuring you have capacity to manage peak volume. It can allow you to avoid downtime, so you never miss a call, and minimize disruptions. And it can reveal if your devices, gateways, and ports are operating as expected.

If your trunks are full or close to it, you know you need more capacity, or at least should be thinking about it. If they are largely unused, it may single that you have an oversupply of capacity and can pull the plug on one of these connections to save yourself some money.

Some trunking analysis solutions can also identify failed routing structures, so you can address those. And some offer trunk visualization, so users can easily see what’s happening with trunk traffic in real time.

 “Traffic analysis helps organizations determine if they are over or under trunked,” notes ISI. “Utilizing traffic analysis reports, an organization can identify their busy hours and how many trunks were used during those busy hours. From these metrics, they can establish the correct number of trunks needed to handle the busy hours at the grade-service they determine.”