Introduction to Telephone Systems

hello again as you know i'm eli the computer guy over here for every man i t today's class is introduction to telephone systems so today we're going to be talking about business class and enterprise-class telephone systems and the components that make them work so this isn't simply the phone you have at your home and a little voice mail system this is where you have something called a PBX and a voicemail system which are basically like servers for telephones we're going to talk about the telephones and how they work we're going to talk about the central office we're going to talk about trunk lines etc so today we're going to talk about all of the components that make a telephone system in a business or enterprise work telephone systems are relatively easy systems to administer as a technologist when you go out into the world you are going to be presented problems with telephone systems and I'm going to tell you telephone systems are not that complicated but most of us don't have any formal training and telephone systems therefore we don't have the foggiest idea what to do when somebody comes to us with a telephone system problem so you know if they need an auto attendant fixed we don't know how to fix that you know if they have a problem with the trunk line most people don't really understand what trunk lines are so this is going to be an introduction class telephone systems and then pass this class we're going to go more in-depth into what telephone systems do again telephone systems are very simple you just have to understand a few simple concepts that seem a little little backwards but when you once you understand that they are backwards and that's just how it is then everything gets gets pretty simple so this class is introduction to telephone systems give me a second to put a few things together and then we'll dive in now before we get into this class I just have to say a word on voice over IP so so you know you're thinking telephone systems and nowadays telephone systems mean voice over IP you think that that's not really the case what we're talking about today are traditional telephone systems so these are telephone systems that have normal voice mailboxes they have they are controlled by something called a PBX and they have normal analog or digital telephone stations this is not voice over IP understand telephone systems are telephone systems voice over IP our data systems that transmit of real-time audio communications and full duplex so basically a telephone system is a telephone system this is a specific type of technology voice over IP is a different type of technology that just happens to transmit voice in real time so you can use voice over IP to do the same thing you would do as you would on a phone call but it's not really a phone call it's voice over IP so so today's class we were talking about telephone systems we will have another class on voice over IP and unified communications but that is not what we're talking about today so don't get confused this is telephone systems we were talking about PB exes and telephones now the first thing that we have to talk about when we were talking about telephone systems is we have to talk about what goes on out side of your building so we will get into the PBX that sits in your side you're building the voicemail that sits inside your building the the telephones that sit inside the building but the first thing to understand with conventional telephones is what goes on outside the building how does that telephone call get to you or get to your building the first place the the first concept you have to understand is the PSTN PST and this is called the public switched telephone network so so just like you have routers for the internet the PSTN is basically like the internet for telephones so this is how telephone calls get routed so basically what happens on the public switched telephone network pstn is you have things called central offices so every area has a central office or a few central offices so I'm not sure how many how many telephone lines a single central office you know does but but it's quite a few so let's say Baltimore may have five central offices a single County might have a central office what this central office is is every single house that has a telephone line in it that telephone line that is sitting in their house that little Jack you have in the wall that actually runs all the way back to the central office so so the wire that's in your wall goes out to what's called the DMark point in the back of your house it goes into that d mark point and then basically the same wire runs up to the telephone pole then on a telephone pole that wire runs all the way back to the central office so basically you have a connection a solid connection all the way from your house or you were building all the way back to the central office so so that's how that works and then what happens is the PSTN is then the network of these central offices so let's say you're sitting here in Los Vegas and you're trying to make a call to Boston using something called a North American dialing plan the North American dialing plan is basically like a routing protocol if you're thinking about a routers a North American dialing plan nadp you can google it will put a little resource at the bottom but basically this is the routing protocol for the telephone system so when you're sitting at your building and you make a call to Boston it looks at that telephone number and depending on the area code and other things that are in that telephone number it can then route that call to Boston or if you're trying to call Atlanta it then will route through these central offices or through something called trunk lines over to Atlanta so that's what central offices are so the PSTN is a public switched telephone network think of this as the internet for telephone systems basically then everybody connects to the telephone system through a central office so so you always have a central office if you have a telephone with a dial tone that connects back to the local central office and you actually really really do the wire that goes from your telephone if you trace it it actually really does trace a mile or two or three miles away all the way back to the central office now the final thing to understand when you're talking about the PSTN the public switched telephone network and you're talking about central offices is of course you know whenever you're dealing with technology you're always dealing with authority who has control over what so if you have the central office that's here and you have your house that's right here right when you make telephone calls the central office or your telephone company is responsible for everything that happens on the PSTN the public switched telephone network they have no responsibility for what goes on inside your building so you know this whole cloud of the PSTN they're responsible for your building they're not responsible for so like I say you have a wire that runs all the way to your building and it's you know it goes you know over over telephone poles and whatnot now the big point is on your building or on your house you are going to have a little box that the wire that runs all the way from your central office is going to stop at and this is called the DMark point de ma RC this is the DMark point so your telephone company is responsible for the telephone signal all the way up to this box on the side of your house or on your building so this is the DMark if anything happens on this side you know so anything you know you don't have a dial tone because the wire got cut etc that is their problem and they will fix it if anything happens on the building side it is your problem and you were forced to fix it so for as far as the PSTN is concerned the public switched telephone network anything on this side of the DMark is their problem anything on this side of the DMark is your problem it's just something that you should understand so this is this is basically it's a central office all like I say all telephone lines go back to a single central honor to a central local central office that central office can next to other central offices and main trunk lines and when you make call like I say all the way out to Las Vegas or to boston or to seattle or whatever the call gets routed using something called a north american dialing plan over the PSTN the public switched telephone network these are just basic overall concepts but there are things that you should understand so now that you understand a little bit about central offices and a little bit about the public switched telephone network the next thing we have to talk about our trunk lines so trunk lines trunk lines are the lines the telephone lines that allow you to communicate with the outside world so if you have the central office here and you have your building here the number of trunk lines you have determines how many phone calls can be going on with the outside world at any one time so if you have one trunk line that means either somebody can be calling in or somebody can be calling out if you have two trunk lines that means two people came by calling in two people can be calling out or one person can be calling out and one person can be calling in so basically however many trunk lines you have determines how many calls can be going on with the outside world from your building so normally if you have like say a 30 or 40 person office you will normally have four trunk lines to be able to communicate with the outside world because most people figure even with 40 people there aren't going to be that many simultaneous calls going on so even with 40 people you can buy for phone lines and that'll be okay now the phone lines so you'll have these four phone lines coming from the central office to your building these will then run into something called the PBX the PBX is the equivalent of a telephone server so the PBX is what actually routes all telephone calls so we're going to talk about the PBX in a minute just understand right now you know it exists so you have these four phone lines to the central office each phone line allows you to either make an incoming or outgoing call now one of the important things to understand with these trunk lines is every single line has its own phone number so so let's say the line number one line number two two three four so let's talk about like how eli the computer guy was line number one our main phone number was 410 685 to a 08 the second number was 410 685 2885 the third was for 106 85 to 88 0 and the fourth was 410 6852 aa9 so every single one of these trunk lines coming in had its own phone number now you may be thinking you may be thinking well that doesn't make any sense because you know when i called eli the computer I what I call a normal business all I do is I call that one main number and I always get through well the reason that happens is when you have incoming calls you have calls from the central office that come to your building there is something being used called a hunt group so what a hunt group is is when you call for 10 6852 808 I had it set up with the central office so this is with verizon this is not inside the building this is over here with a central office I had a hunt group that was created that said if 410 685 2808 is busy forward to call automatically 2410 685 2885 if that is busy forward the call automatically 2410 685 28 a0 and if that is busy forward the call automatically 2410 6852 889 so basically if any one of these phone numbers was busy the call was automatically forward forwarded to the next number in the list this is something called oh let's put right here this is something called a hunt group and again this is set up at the central office this is set up with your telephone company verizon quest bell atlantic 80 whoever you have is your telephone company is the one that sets this up so basically you know you have these trunk lines coming in so so you can only have as many simultaneous conversations going on as you have trunk lines so so like i said if you have if you have 40 people I would suggest you have four trunk lines if you have 10 people maybe you can have three trunk lines but basically every incoming call and every outgoing call will take up one of your trunk lines once you run out of trunk lines nobody can call in and nobody can call out now how this works from the outside world is that you set up something called a hunt group so when somebody calls your main number for 1068 5280 a if this if somebody is already called and so this is busy you will automatically be forwarded to 4 10 6 8 5 to 8 a-5 if that is busy you will automatically be for 240 685 2880 and etc that this is how this works not only that but right now we're talking about normal telephone lines so we're actually talking about telephone cables that run off the telephone pole and all the way down it into your PBX through some wiring this is the same thing that happens even if you're using what's called a voice over IP trunk or you're using a t1 trunk so no matter what no matter how you're doing it every single telephone line that comes into your building or come as into your PBX which is the telephone server every single line has to have its own phone number and then what you do like I say is you set up the hunt group to make sure that um that you know if one line is busy it automatically gets forwarded to the next now the question you may have is well what happens when you're trying to call out so you know you understand you know so people will trying to call in you know get the hunt group but people calling out well what you can do is you can create groups calling out groups within the pbx based on certain rules so basically what you can say is you can actually have this be the opposite so you can say with calls going out and you program this into the pbx I want you to use the number for line first so I want you to use for 1068 5289 if that is being used then I want you to use for 106 85 to 88 0 and that is being used I want you to use for 1068 5 to 8 a-5 so basically now within the pbx you can program how you want people to be able to call out now let's say you don't always want it or you want to make sure that all of your lines aren't always busy although you have four lines coming into your building within your PBX you could program the telephone system to only allow the last two numbers to be used for outgoing calls so you can only have two outgoing calls that's something that you can that you can do beyond that you can also program within the pbx like certain features so let's say you have you have a line that has long distance on it you can actually program in the pbx to say that only certain stations or telephones or allowed to call out and to use that particular line to make long distance calls that's going to get into something that is much more complicated but but basically to bring that bring this back so to make sure you guys understand what's going on because we're going to have a lot of classes in this the next class we're going to have is it be going to be about call routing so so in this class will try to keep it a little more simple the big thing is is these trunk lines like I say every single trunk line is is one incoming or one outgoing call one call so so if you want for calls to happen at one time you have to have for trunk lines from the central offices perspective you know if you want four lines and people be of a call so that you have a main phone number and then you have these three other trunk lines you set up something called a hunt groups so if 410 685 2808 is busy it goes down to your second if that's busy it goes down to your third if that's busy it goes down to your fourth that set up again on the central office that's called a hunt group so you just call up horizon and you say I have these for phone numbers I want to set up a hunt group this is how I want it to work then when you're talking about outgoing calls so you're talking about you're sitting inside your building and you're going to call it to the outside world you can set up rules and you can set up out calling groups within the pbx the pbx is basically the telephone server and you can put in all kinds of insane rules pbx and like I say we'll talk about that in the call routing class but understand so so calling out using the trunk lines get programmed into the PBX coming in gets program at the central office you call verizon or quest or AT&T or bell atlantic going out you program inside your own PBX so this is essentially how trunk lines work like I say right now we're just talking about normal normal wires coming in from the telephone line but this is the exact same case whether you're using t1 or voice over IP trunks this is this is the the basic concept of how it works so we've talked about the public switched telephone network the PSTN we've talked about the central offices now we've talked about the trunk lines that come all the way to your building now once these trunk lines get to your building they're going to hit something called the P B X the pbx is for all intents and purposes the telephone server this is what routes the telephone calls that you're making on the system so so if you're trying to call your boss and in the room over and you just dial an extension 345 the pbx is what routes the call from you here over to your boss so so the call goes into the pbx and then it goes over to the boss the extension if you're trying to contact somebody out on the public switched telephone network and you make a call it goes into the pbx and then the pbx routes that call out to the public switched telephone network so the pbx is basically the server that routes all the calls now PB exes are really cool like I say we're going to have another class on cal routing because you can do insane amazing things with call routing there's just there are a lot of things that ways you can route calls you can put permissions on lines you can create call groups hunt groups just out calling just just a lot of cool stuff but that'll be another class the main thing that you have to understand is that the pbx is like the server or maybe the router for your telephone system if you call another extension in the building it is what routes the call to that extension if you call out to the outside world that that the pbx is what routes the call to the outside world if a call comes in from the outside world to your building the pbx is the one to route it to you or to your boss or to a voicemail system or to wherever basically the pbx is what routes all the calls now PB exes are like I said we'll get into a class on them are really not not that hard to administer if you understand a few concepts and you understand what you're supposed to be doing pbx is aren't that hard to administer now one of the the hiccups the telephone companies through into the telephone system is that for some reason they divided the pbx and the voicemail system and made them separate so your PBX and your voicemail system are not normally the same box the voicemail system is actually an add-on to the pbx so you know you'll buy via whatever they are PBX for six hundred dollars and then you have to buy a voicemail system that connects to that pic now pbx for another five or six hundred dollars and so all of the voice mail stuff is controlled by the voicemail system as I say with with a via this is called audax aud X you know whatever telephone system company that you're dealing with they'll probably call it something else but the main thing is the pbx routes the calls the voicemail is what deals with all the voices so you know all the voice mail stuff here here's the weird the weird problem and something that you kind of just have to have in your head is so the pbx routes all the calls and the voicemail deals with all the voice stuff now one of the weird things is as we'll talk about in the in the in the routing class the call route in class when we have it is when you create something called an auto attendant so an auto attendant is where you call into a business and then as soon as you call and it goes thank you for calling eli the computer guy if you need sales press 1 if you need tech support press 2 if you need to just go away press three so that's what it auto attended this auto attendant hell as many of us know so so you call in and you get this message and then it says you know press 1 for sales press 2 for this press three for that here's one of the weird hinky things that message that you're listening to resides on the voicemail system the routing that happens when you press one or press two or press 3 happen ones in the pbx so when you set up something called an auto attendant that doesn't all reside on the PBX basically what happens is within the PBX you say I one extension 800 to be an auto attendant and then you put in if somebody presses one go to an extension 304 somebody presses to go to extension 305 if somebody presses 3 go to ascension 306 and if somebody presses zero hang up right so that is what is programmed into the PBX but the message that you are hearing is in the voicemail so what will happen is you'll create extension 800 it'll be an auto attendant it will have all these settings and then it will also say play voice mailbox 800 so basically you have to point this auto attendant that's sitting in the PBX to a voice mail box sitting in the voicemail system again when we go into call routing as we get more into into into all of this this will make more sense once we're actually doing it but the main thing to realize which can be a real pain in the butt is a lot of the normal functions that you think about with a telephone system are actually split between what's called the PBX and between the voicemail system these are two entirely separate systems even if they they plug in together etc there are two different systems even in the voice over IP realm they've kind of kept this hinky ass set up so so even though in voice over IP everything really does reside in the same server they've still kept this whole mess where the PBX the routing call routing functionality and the voicemail functionality are separate just understand whenever you're dealing with routing and the PBX that requires a voice prompt like I say thank you for calling eli the computer guy if you if you want sales press one if you want whatever press to that message is always going to reside in the voicemail system so whenever you're setting up something within the PBX that requires a voice prompt you're going to have to the point that that rule to the voicemail system by I say that Mei be a little hinky right now but but you understand it later the main thing is whenever you're dealing with a telephone system so all the trunk lines come into your building those trunk lines however they get there are going to connect to the telephone system the telephone system is fundamentally two parts the PBX is what routes all the calls so if you call a local extension it is what routes the cost if you call out to the outside world is what routes a cost somebody calls ed it is what routes the calls and you have the voice mail system so if the the PBX routes a call and you do not pick up then the PBX routes the call to the voice mail system and that's where you get the voicemail prompt thank you for calling Eli I'm sorry I'm not here please leave a message after the beep that component sits in the voicemail system so these are these are two different critters I say as we go along and this will all make a lot more sense but this is the basic telephone system so let's talk about stations now what our stations you may ask stations are what you may think of as telephones but just like the computer world where they come up with a whole bunch of new lingo to explain what you thought you always understood telephones are no longer telephones and the telephone world telephones are stations so there's a reason for this in what you have to understand is remember a telephone system is a system that allows you to do audio communication so it allows you to call people but allows you to do more than simply make normal telephone calls so when you have a station you know you may have your normal telephone but you may also have an intercom system so so with a lot of these telephones systems you can actually call an extension so if you need somebody in the warehouse you can call an extension you say Bob we need your help up front and that will go out through the speakers in the warehouse ma boy need your help from so so that speaker system or an intercom system is considered a station you can also have you know when you go to an apartment building and there you have a little front door and you have one of those little-little call boxes that is a station so when you're dealing in the telephone world telephones aren't really always telephones telephones are stations so stations can be can be the telephone that you're used to it can be some kind of intercom system it can be that call box up front all of these things will connect back to a PBX and calls will be routed accordingly so basically with this call box here you can route in the PBX and to say if anybody presses this button on the call box that is going to ring the the Secretary's desk and so when somebody presses the call box that will actually ring the Secretary's desk the debt the Secretary will pick up the telephone say hello how can I help you and you'll be able to talk in again you know this intercom system will be an extension let's say 805 so if you're sitting at a telephone and you plug in the extension 805 when you start talking that is going to go out over the intercom system you know in the warehouse or wherever so so with PBXs with telephone systems you're dealing with more than telephones you're dealing with intercom systems call boxes etc now how these telephones and these are these call boxes and all that communicate back with the pbx is something important to understand so you have your PBX right here and then you have your telephone now in a normal like I say we're not talking about voice over IP here get all that crap out of your head because we're not talking about that right now in a normal telephone systems you have two ways to transmit communication you either have analog o log or you have digital so you can have an analog telephone line or a digital telephone line this is very very very very important so the standard telephone you have at your house is probably an analog telephone if you just plug it straight into the wall jack in your house that's an analog telephone to understand an analog telephone for all intensive purposes is a really complex version of the can and string telephones you used to play with as a kit so you know you take two soup cans you drill a little hole in the back of the soup cans and you run a string and somebody talks into one end and somebody puts the thing up at the other and you can hear the hear the conversation right an analog telephone system like I say it's just incredibly complicated version of that so when you talk into the little microphone that's sitting you know on your telephone or the call box or whatever your actual voice that sound wave is maintained its put on something called carrier waves etc to make the phone call happen but your actual voice is transmitted all the way to the person on the other side of the line so the person is sitting in a in an office you know three doors down or whether the person is sitting in Japan if that is an analog telephone a call your actual sound waves are getting transmitted all the way over to Japan the problem is is since your actual sound waves gain transported all the way to Japan if there's any static or if there is any interference on the line that interference gets put onto that analog line so so basically if you're talking over a long distance and there's a thunderstorm that thunderstorm can create interference and it just it makes a static and the rest of them so what they did is they came up with digital communication so what digital communications telephone systems do is they turn your voice into ones and zeros so if you look into something called an oscilloscope instead of having sound waves you have something that looks like this this is basically it turns your voice into ones and zeros now this is important when you get to your telephone system so now analog takes your real voice it's actually your voice all the way to Japan digital turns your voice into a digital signal and then transmits that and then puts it back together so what happened in the in the old days you know 20 years ago for PBXs telephone manufacturing companies wanted to offer more and more features to the people buying telephone systems now the problem was in order to have those features they couldn't use the old analog telephone handsets because they were not capable of giving the features so they started selling digital telephones for digital telephone systems so this is where the telephone communicates with the PBX using ones and zeros so it's a digital call but as we'll go into an other classes this gives a lot of more functionality to this telephone the problem is is an analog phone cannot understand what a digital signal and a digital phone cannot understand an analog signal so if you have a digital PBX and you plug in an analog phone nothing is going to happen you will plug in the phone you're not going to get dial tone you're not going to get anything because that analog phone does not understand how to talk to a digital telephone system if you have a digital phone and you have an analog telephone system again the phone is not going to work because the digital phone does not understand the analog system so this is important when you're buying a new or newish PB exes they will normally have both analog and digital ports because like if you buy a fax machine most fax machines are analog so if you try to plug that fax machine into the digital port on the pbx it's not going to work so what happens on most of these PB X's on the back of it more on the front of it it looks almost like a switch so you'll have however many ports you have telephone lines out to those stations right and then at one point you'll most likely have a couple of analog ports so you'll have digital ports and these go to digital phones or digital fax machines or digital intercom systems and then you have a few analog ports this is what can go to your normal standard analog fax machine if you have a modem so I don't know if you're still using a computer modem that's what you would have to plug into this used to be a big problem back when i use worked in the corporate world you know 10 years ago because everybody still use modems to get email and all that so they would come to our corporate offices they would plug into a normal what they thought was a normal telephone line and they couldn't get anything they couldn't get dial tone they couldn't dial out etc the reason was is because they were plugging into a digital port and so they're they're low fax machine and then doing it so the main thing to remember like I say with with stations is when you get into the telephone world telephones are no longer tell telephones are stations so there are a lot of things that stations can do stations can be telephone stations can be intercom system stations can be call boxes all of those are stations all of those connect back to the PBX at some point then when you're dealing with the PBX remember most PB X's they're either going to be digital or analog some of them have both digital and analog ports the main thing that you have to understand is you have to plug your device into the right port if you have a standard fax machine or a standard modem and you plug it into a digital port it's not going to work if you have a digital phone and you plug into an analog port it's not going to work so digital devices Haffey uploaded into digital ports analog devices have to get plugged into analog ports remember all that it's pretty simple so as we talked about the the telephone system has both the PBX and the voicemail system although they may be connected together although they may even be in one box engineering-wise their two still two separate things so when you're talking with about the PBX and you're talking about telephones you're talking about the PBX and stations when you're talking about voicemail you're not talking about like people or users you're talking about subscribers so whenever you're talking about users of a voicemail system you are talking about subscribers to that voicemail system now like I say the voicemail system can do a lot of different things obviously you can do voicemail it can have little bulletin board messages on the voicemail system so like I had one client who wanted to tell people what their tax ID number was so you could call in to what was called an auto attendant and it would say thank you for calling XYZ if you need to talk to somebody press 1 if you need a directions to our place press 2 if you need our tax ID number press 3 if you press three all I did there was no voicemail box there was nothing all I did was give just a voice message it said thank you our tax ID number is 5 7 8 9 6 6 6 p-11 so all that that boy stuff happens within the voicemail system now a big thing to understand with subscribers is subscribers don't always have to be attached to stations so stations are the telephone subscribers are the users of the voicemail system well like with a lot of companies you may call in let's say to like a sales department and the salesperson actually doesn't have a desk at that company all they did is they created a voicemail box for that sales person you call in and you will never get them on the phone they don't have a telephone setting on their desk because they don't have a desk so whenever you call in it to get that person it automatically routes to their voicemail box so that's a big thing to understand with with voicemail systems is subscribers may have a station attached to them may have a telephone associated with them but they don't have to have a telephone associated with them so like I say is if you're dealing with a company that has a lot of like field people you may just have 50 mailboxes voicemail boxes without telephones because when people call in you just route them directly to their voicemail the other thing like I say that the voicemail does is for things like like message services so you know you can put on you can say what the directions are to your facility and say what your hours are you can say tax ID number etc and then the voice mailbox is also where you put all the voice instructions for something called the auto attendant so the auto attendant is what routes your calls like I say when you call in to business and it says thanks you thank you for calling the computer guy for sales press one that message is all residing in the voicemail system so so those are the important parts with a voicemail system the final again hanky parp with voicemail systems that you have to be careful about is you have to make sure you buy the right number of ports now as I've said before remember the voicemail system and the pbx the telephone server are actually two different components so when you buy the pbx you may have four incoming trunk lines and let's say nine station lines right so you think if you plug in the voicemail system that that all the people that are going to be calling in can get into the voicemail that's not necessarily so when you buy the voice mail you also buy a certain number of ports ports are the number of people that can be using the voice mail system at any one time so if you have 50 subscribers and stations and you only have two ports that means only two people will be allowed to access the voicemail system at any one time no matter how many trunk lines you have coming in so you could have 10 trunk lines coming in but you when you hit the auto attendant so if you have one person hitting the audio tenant than two people hitting the auto attendant the third person they're gonna they're going to hit the PBX but but they're not actually going to get any messages they're not going to be told anything so so because you only have two ports so the big thing to understand with voicemail the stupid thing is remember the number of ports you buy says how many people can be accessing the voicemail system at any one time again some of these lower end systems they initially sell it to you with only two ports and you may have to spend four hundred dollars for in another two ports so you may not be thinking about it you may be getting all these complaints because when people are calling in they're not getting the auto attendant it's not because there's any configuration problem it's because you have not bought enough ports so with the voicemail system the number of ports you buy are the number of people that can be interacting with the voicemail system at any one time once you go over that number of ports you don't get anything general so like I say in the voicemail world users of the voicemail system are called subscribers not all subscribers have to be attached to stations you can have voicemail boxes without without stations without telephones again the voicemail is what gives all the voice prompts so like to say whether it's auto attendant whether it's message boards etc but it will only allow however many ports you have purchased two accesses so like I say is you have 50 users and you have 10 trunk lines but you only about two ports for your voicemail system only two people can be interacting with that voicemail system at any one time it's hinky it's stupid but it's how it works so that was a class on introduction the telephone system so I say this is this is just supposed to be an overview we're going to have more in-depth classes on how all this works again telephone systems I mean compared to servers and compared to networks they're a joke they're very easy to administer but the main thing is you have to understand what you're doing have to understand all of these concepts once you understand the concepts is very easy if you don't understand the concepts it's all just gobbledygook probably like everything else is we talked about the outside world so we talked about how calls actually get to your building so we talked about the North American dialing plan which is basically like the routing protocol for the public switched telephone network the PSTN the public switched telephone network think about as an internet for telephone calls so when you're in Las Vegas and you're calling somebody in Boston you dial the number the number you dial based on that number the North American dialing plan looks at it and then through the public switched telephone network it routes that call all the way to Boston now once it gets to Boston you know as I said every single phone line you have every cable that runs from your building goes back to a central office so the central office is the first point that everybody connects to so I say at your house your telephone line and literally runs all the way back to the central office now the main thing as i said is there's the DMark point on your building this the mark point like i say with verizon it's a little grey box that's normally screwed to the outside of the building and the telephone company is responsible for everything up to that gray box on the other side of the grey box on the other side inside your building you are responsible for everything so so so that's something just to just to keep in mind we talked about like I say this class was on telephone systems this class was not on voice over IP because voice over IP is not telephone it is real-time audio communication using a data network which simulates a telephone which is a lot like a telephone but it's not a telephone telephones are telephones VoIP or voice over IP is audio communications over data networks they are two different critters we will have a class on voice over IP so you understand that better we talked about the trunk lines so the trunk lines however many trunk lines you have or how many concurrent communications you can have with the outside world so every incoming call uses a trunk line every outgoing call uses a trunk line so if you have four trunk lines and you have four incoming calls you are not going to be able to make any outgoing calls if all your salespeople are trying to make a lot of calls and they're calling out you know you have four trunk lines you have four of your sales people calling out then nobody can call in so your trunk lines are the total number of communications you can be having with the outside world either incoming or outgoing like I say every single trunk line has its own phone number whether your eat whether you actually have the telephone cable that runs into your building or whether you're using a t1 line or whether you're using what's called a voice over IP trunk every single phone line our trunk line has its own foreign phone number so you know with us you have the main number which was for 1068 5280 it we then had three additional telephone numbers with the central office with verizon we called and we created something called a hunt group so if the first phone number was busy for 106 a 5 to 8 08 invisibly to the caller the call was automatically forwarded to the second phone number I'll enlist if that was busy was automatically forwarded to third number less if that was busy was automatically forwarded to the fourth number in the list so this is how incoming calls happen so whether you have two trunk lines or whether you have a hundred trunk lines all you do is you create this hunt group so if this is busy go to this if this is busy oh this is it busy cuz this that the et cetera it's very easy now that's on the central office you know the telephone person side so incoming calls outgoing calls all of that is controlled by your PBX and like I say we will talk about more about programming PB X's and call routing later but basically when you're calling out you can also create rules you can create rules about what stations can use a can use the long distance telephone number that kind of stuff all the outgoing rowdy is controlled by the PBX we talked you know that the PBX and the voicemail system even if they now reside in the same box engineering-wise for whatever reason that they are logically divided so the PBX is what routes the telephone calls the voicemail system is what has all the audio prompts and audio boxes so any any audio stuff you hear thank you for calling eli the computer guy please leave a message after the beep any of that kind of stuff is sitting within the voicemail system like I say get it gets a little thinking a little weird but but that's how it works we talked about stations so when you look at a telephone a telephone is on longer a telephone a telephone is a station now stations can be any number of things they can either be what you think of as a telephone they can be an intercom system they can be a call box system they can be anything that an engineer comes up with so basically any communications device that connects back to the PBX is a station like I say all you do with this stations is you create a little extension on the PBX and then let's say you have an intercom system in the warehouse you can just pick up the phone you can dial extent whatever that extension is and you can say hey Bob I need your help up front and that will go out Oh through the warehouse now we talked about that there are analog stations and digital stations so when you have your PBX it'll either be an analog PBX or a digital PBX or a mix of both so a lot of times now you will have digital lines on the PBX and analog lines on the PBX analog phones or analog stations can only communicate through an analog port digital stations can only communicate through a digital port so if you take your phone from home into the office and you plug it straight into that PBX if that is indeed digital PBX your phone from home will not work because your phone from home is an analog phone this gets really important like I say when you're plugging in things like fax machine so you buy this really fancy expensive $3,000 fax machine and you can't figure out why you can't get the damn thing faqs well the reason is this probably because you plugged it into a digital line on the PBX you just need to plug it into the analog line we talked about the voicemail system and again in the voice mail system you talk with you about users of the voicemail system as subscribers so anybody who has a voice mailbox is a subscriber voice mailboxes or subscribers may have stations they may have telephones connected to them or they may not so like I say a lot of layers in the modern companies all they have in their telephone system is a voicemail boxes for like I say their salespeople so whenever you call in you will never get that sales person to actually pick up the phone you automatically always get routed into the voicemail box it's just something to understand and then finally like I say this is hinky this is dumb this just wants to make you punch the sales and legal people but depending on what voicemail system you use you may have to worry about buying ports so what ports our airports are basically licenses for concurrent connections to the voicemail system so like I say I used to buy a via voicemail systems and they would come with a standard of two ports that means only two people can be using the voice mail system at any one time the reason this gets really dumb really quick is that it does not just mean that your employees are calling in to check what their voicemail is that also means people calling in from the outside world if all of those ports are being used they will not hear that auto attendant so i would suggest at the very minimum you get the same amount a number of ports as you get trunk lines so if you have four trunk lines get up coming in get at least four ports I mean that'd be a nightmare it can be can be really really horrible that's I mean that's that's the basic class the introduction to telephone systems if you're going out and you're going to start trying to administer these telephone systems like I say hold on we're gonna have a few more classes before you try to start touching them one of the things you have to realize again that makes telephone systems such a pain in the butt is especially lower end telephone system so we're talking about telephone systems like to ten thousand dollars or less many times the only way to administer these telephone systems is actually through the telephone itself you know whether you're creating auto attendants whether you're creating really complex plans you have to do it all through a telephone so you know how like you you call your cell phone voicemail and it says you know if you want to change your greeting press three so you press three and it says if you want to change your your your whatever greeting press 1 if you want to change your busy greeting press 2 and you go in well imagine having to do that for something that's much more complex multiple auto attendants multiple multiple stuff just understand that a lot of these telephone systems you actually have to program using the telephone so you you dial some code and it says thank you for for logging into the Avaya telephone system it is illegal to use this for improper purposes what would you like to do and you go ok i'll press nine thank you for getting to this ministry of console if you would like to change this process that's and then you you have to administer that way it can be a royal just just complete pain in the butt and so that's what it will caution you with if you're thinking about administering some of these telephone systems is because if you do something dumb and you wipe out a configuration it's not like a little gooey a little graphic interface where you can just put it back and it's okay if you do something dumb like delete and auto attendant I mean it may be hours upon hours of work to try to recreate that auto attendant using just a telephone keypad to do it it really really really can't be that bad so that's one of the last things I'll say just the warnings you know the final thoughts warning warning warning is like say a lot of the lower end telephone systems you have to administer actually through the telephone you don't you can't plug a computer into it etc and that can be just a royal or royal pain in the ass so as you know i'm eli the computer guy over here for every man i t this is introduction to telephone system so we're gonna have a lot more courses in this track so if you're if you're not fully up at this point up to you know understanding everything don't worry there's gonna be a lot more courses and all this will make a lot more sense this is just the basic components of what telephone systems are made up of now that you understand this we can go off to call routing and we go off the voice over IP and we can go off to a lot of the cool stuff so so as always it was really good teaching this class and I look forward to seeing to the next one

Channel: Eli the Computer Guy

Views: 775,192

Rating: 4.8901515 out of 5

Keywords: introduction, to, telephone, systems, 5M

Id: Tahfluke6cU

Length: 54min 2sec (3242 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 17 2011