Glossary

Here is a short summary of acronyms and their meaning as it relates to the telecommunications industry.

A2P – Application to Person messaging.

Application to Person messaging refers to any kind of SMS / MMS message that is originated or sent by by an application and not by a human. These types of outreach campaigns are usually initiated by a enterprise company, non profit or school who is using software to determine who should be targeted, how frequently and at what time of day.

CCaaS – Contact Center as a Service

Contact Center as a Service is the umbrella term for any contact center application residing natively in the cloud and accessible most commonly via a web browser. A soft phone application running standalone as an application on the local PC or integrated into an application like Salesforce or Hubspot CRM are common. These applications are purchased by the agent / supervisor per month. The beauty of the CCaaS model is that it’s easy to deploy and flexible if your workforce fluctuates throughout the course of a year. This offers a very predictable pricing model.

CNAM – Caller Name Delivery, Caller Name Presentation (Outside US)

Caller Name Delivery is used in US Based telephone networks to provide the name of the calling party most often in the form of a Caller ID or a business name.
The caller’s name can also be blocked and display “restricted” or “not available” if technical errors occur.

DID, DDI – Direct Inward Dial, Direct Dial-in (Europe)

Direct Inward Dialing also called Direct Dial-in in Europe is a telecommunications services offered by telephone companies or exchanges to subscribers who operate a premise or cloud PBX. This services provides for multiple telephone numbers over one or more analog or digital circuits. The telephone company transmits the dialed number to the PBX which can route it directly to an extension, an IVR, a call center queue, etc.
Despite the name, a DID can be used for two way calling as well. If I am at a PBX extension with DID (xxx) xxx-xxxx assigned to it, I can use that number to make outbound calls.
DID’s can also be associate with a dialer for outbound campaigns.

IVR – Interactive Voice Response

The Interactive Voice Response (IVR) sometimes called an Automated Attendant or Voice Response Unit (VRU), is a technology which allows humans to interact with a software based phone systems through the use of DTMF tones entered via a telephone keypad or though natural language speech recognition via voice prompts.
Many times IVR’s are used as self service applications for business to offload traffic from the inbound contact center and for automating simple tasks like a customer asking, “Where is my order?” or, “What is my bank balance?”. The IVR can process this request and deliver the results to the end user quickly and efficiently. This helps to drive down operating costs and improve agent satisfaction.
IVR’s are used to take input (DTMF, Speech, Automated input via API), process it, and return a result.
Automated Attendants are used to simply route calls after applying some basic time of day / day of week / business hours logic.

ISDN – Integrated Services Digital Network

Integrated Services Digital Network is a set of communication standards for simultaneous digital transmission of voice, video, data and other network services over the digitized circuits of the public switched telephone network (PSTN).These are most commonly provisioned at T1 / E1 lines. A T1 has 24 x 64bit/s channels where 23 are commonly used as bearer channels and one is used for signaling. An E1 is popular in Europe or if provisioning a private E1 between communications systems and it consists of 29 x 64kbit/sec channels and one for signaling for a total of 30 channels.

LAN – Local Area Network

A local area network or LAN is a collection of devices connected together in one physical location, such as a building, office, or home. Your internet router / wireless switch is the LAN for your home.

PRI – Primary Rate Interface

This is a telecommunication interface standard that is still in use today on a Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) for carrying multiple DS0 bearer channels (23 + a signal) between the network (AT&T, Verizon, etc.) and a user. Many companies are phasing out ISDN / PRI’s for SIP trunks because they are more flexible and offer better failover capabilities.

SIP – Session Initiation Protocol

Session Initiation Protocol is a signaling protocol used for initiating, maintaining and terminating a communication session that may include voice, video and messaging applications. SIP is very commonly used as the modern protocol in internet telephony (UCaaS and CCaaS) as well as for private enterprise telephone systems (replacing legacy ISDN-PRI), mobile phone calling and as a way to connect two adjuncts together like a UC platform and a Voice Mail platform.

T1 – Transmission System 1

Developed by AT&T Bell Labs in 1962, the Transmission System 1 (T1) could transmit up to 24 telephone calls simultaneously over a single line of copper wire. A T1 is broken down into 24 channels called DS0. Each DS0 is 64kbit/s. As a data circuit a T1 can transmit up to 1.544 Mbit/s.

TFN – Toll Free Number

Toll Free Numbers allow end users to contact you or your business without being charged a toll by the telephone carrier. In the United States, Canada and other countries participating in the North American Numbering Plan (NANP), a toll free number can have any of the following area codes. 800, 833, 844, 855, 866, 877, and 888.

UC – Unified Communications

UM – Unified Messaging

Unified Messaging, as it was first introduced by Octel in 1990, gave a voicemail user to access their voicemail messages through a variety of channels other than the button on their PBX connected business phone. They could also now access voicemail via a pilot number they could dial and enter their mailbox number and password to access their mailbox. It was also possible to connect the voicemail platform to various POP or IMAP4 email systems which gave end users a view into their voicemailbox via an email client like lotus notes and Microsoft exchange.

UCaaS – Unified Communications as a Service

Contact Center as a Service is the umbrella term for any voice / video / collaboration application residing natively in the cloud and accessible via a web browser, browser plugin, or application. These applications are purchased by the user (concurrent or named) on a per month basis. The beauty of the UCaaS model is that it’s easy to deploy and flexible if your workforce fluctuates throughout the course of a year. This offers a very predictable pricing model.

VAR – Value Added Reseller

A value added reseller is a business that sells one or more SaaS, cloud or original equipment manufacturers software and hardware solutions and has the expertise and recourses to design, configure, install and/or maintain that equipment or software.

WAN – Wide Area Network

Wide Area Networks or WAN’s are large computer networks that connect smaller groups of networks, called Local Area Networks (LAN’s), together typically over large distances. Lets say company ABC has offices in Los Angeles and Boston. Each office has its own LAN which connects its servers, PC’s and other devices. Company ABC would typically partner with a large carrier like AT&T, Verizon, L3 and get long distance data circuits to connect Boston to LA. When provisioned, these circuits act as the WAN to connect the two LAN’s together.