Monthly Archives: January 2015

Churches, Synagogues, Mosques and other places of worship usually require a sound system that helps get that inspirational message across and provide clear communications to devotees. Bogen Communications http://www.bogen-paging.com designs a line of professional sound equipment specifically for these applications. Many places of worship can offer difficult acoustic challenges with hard surfaces and tall ceilings.
Although places of worship can be very different from large cathedrals to small chapels Bogen offers a large selection of products for large and small buildings. In designing a system there are several questions that need to be looked at. Including the size of the building including ceiling heights, if the system will be used for music, if so how many channels or microphones will be required, will wireless microphones be required or will a stationary microphone attached to a pulpit be used instead, will a choir need to be microphoned? Other places of worship require a sophisticated multimedia audio and visual presentation.

Whatever your requirements Bogen Communications has been designing and manufacturing church sound systems since 1932. One of Bogen’s most popular speakers for places of worship are the very affordable Orbital Pendant speakers that hang from the ceiling. The Orbit Pendant Speaker (OPS1) is the ideal choice for high ceiling and open space environments. The low-distortion speaker design, featuring NEAR's spiderless driver and one-piece metal-alloy cone structure, delivers superb articulation and the highest intelligibility for both music and speech.

Other Bogen products include the Apogee line of sound systems for large applications. Bogen’s Apogee digital sound systems have been used in the following places of worship:

Grand Mosque- Mecca, Saudi Arabia
One of the largest sound systems ever built uses 320 of Apogee's digitally controlled amplifiers, powering nearly 5000 speakers.

Second Baptist Church- Houston, Texas
This sizeable venue utilizes a wide range of Apogee products that deliver the message clearly and distinctly to each one of the 6,500 seats.

St. Timothy's Church- Phoenix, Arizona
Apogee's economical ACS products were chosen to provide this large Catholic church with a top quality system that can handle speech and music as well as the needs of leading Christian touring artists who visit the church regularly.

If your place of worship needs help with designing a sound system we invite you to use our free sound system design service. Or call 800-335-0229. Our design service can look at your application and design a system with your vision and budget in mind.

Many free phone system quote sites are nothing more than sites that peddle your contact information to the highest bidder making you the target for lots of phone calls and emails. How do I know? Because I subscribed to their service as a seller of phone systems I can tell what you are up against. My company would pay a monthly subscription for leads that the phone system quote sites would generate. The biz site would email us a list of companies that signed and requested a quote on a new phone system. When we would call the customer (you) they would always respond something like this. “ This is the 10th call I am getting today about the phone system.” The customer would be inundated with phone calls and would be very short. Of course who wants to get all those sales calls from dozens of guys who want to sell you something? Don’t get me wrong, we want to help any customer who needs a new phone system just not that way.

When a customer requests a quote on our http://www.telcom-data.com/phone-quote.aspx site that information is never sold. We will instead contact you once for a consultation over the phone. We may have to send someone out to walk through you business to get a better idea of what you our customer is looking for or we may just quote you via email.

Telcom & Data will ask you some questions so we can better understand your needs. The thing we want to make sure of is that the phone system actually helps improve your business. After all what is the sense of buying a new phone system unless there is value for your investment? That value should come in one or more of the following ways.

1. Improved customer service. A new phone system should help you to connect to customers more effectively with faster response times. This can be done a number of ways including DID numbers for departments, CRM integration with the Caller ID info, Recording of Calls for training purposes.

2. Increasing Sales. A phone system can help you increase sales a couple of ways. It should be able to track and report on the number of phone calls you are making and receiving. If you have a sales team tracking their phone efforts can help you increase business by confirming the number of calls your sales people are making. Giving your sales team daily reports can help them improve call goals. Inbound call information can help identify your marketing efforts and which ones are working. Special numbers can be set up and tracked for A/B comparisons.

3. Employee retention and Green Technology. Offering employees a work from home benefit is huge in keeping employees longer and happier. New phone systems can be set up with IP phones that work from and high speed internet access. The phone can be made to work the same way at the office. This would allow them to be able to perform from home the same tasks as from the office. This can help reduce the amount of space you have to lease and give your employee less of a commute and more family time. It has been proven that work from home folks actually work longer and harder with less interruptions then their at the office counter parts.

4. Reducing costs. Taking advantage of new IP technology can help reduce phone costs by 30-40 %. New SIP trunking technology offers users better rates and have lower costs per line.

For more information on implementing a new phone system call 800-335-0229 . From the desk of Ricardo Trinidad

Need Avaya phone system support in the Chicagoland area? We provide complete phone system support for Partner, Merlin Legend, Definity, IP Office, Audix and more. Since 1996 ,Telcom & Data has been providing expert onsite and remote technical support with only a 1 hour minimum. Many companies charge 2 or more hours minimum billing.

Our technicians are certified and ready to handle your next service request and carry a large inventory of spare parts. Telcom & Data carries thousands of Lucent and Avaya manufactured telephone system parts to keep your phone system running smooth. Our large inventory includes hard to find power supplies, processors, voice mail systems, digital phones, analog phones and IP sets. We offer affordable on site rates of only $ 145.00 per hour with no travel costs in the 312 area code.

Telcom & Data also provides phone system upgrades and expansions for all Avaya and Lucent manufactured phone systems.

Need a new phone system? Telcom & Data can provide any size business with a complete turn solution that can help your business grow. Click here for a free on line quote or to request a free onsite visit call 312-432-1192. Visit on line at www.telcom-data.com

Tired of having to shop and research for telecommunications products and services? This easy to use web site delivers a vast array of telecom manufacturers, products and solutions. If your job is a telecommunications manager, a buyer of telecommunications products or a business owner www.telcom-data.com is worth taking a look at. What makes this super site different is that it carries a huge a variety of telecom products from most of the leading telecommunications manufacturers which makes it easy to do product research and procurement. According to Ricardo Trinidad, the President and CEO of Telcom & Data Inc, “one of the main features of the site is that our sales people are able to make live changes to the product descriptions and features in response to customer phone calls. Most times manufacturer’s descriptions of products are coming from an engineer and the description is intended for another engineer. We break it down so that anyone can understand what the product can do and what the benefits are. We take questions from customers and revise descriptions so that is takes the guess work out of how the product works and how it benefits the customer”
The 14 year old site offers products and services including IP Phone Systems, older hard to find Avaya, Lucent and AT&T phone parts, Unified Messaging, UPS Battery Back Up, Paging Systems, Emergency Evacuation Products, Computer Data Cabinets, Phone Recording, Call Accounting Software, ACD Call Center Solutions, Conference Room Solutions, Audio and Web Conferencing, Video Conferencing Systems, Emergency 911 Solutions, Headsets, T1, PRI, and SIP Trunking services. The site also offers services including installation, programming and maintenance support throughout the US.

Telecom & Data receives thousands of orders from customers world wide.To make sure that customers get what they wanted all purchases carry a 60 day return policy that includes free shipping on returned items. Telcom & Data also offers free support to customers that have questions on use and set up of items. If onsite installation is requested, Telcom & Data maintains a network of over 1600 technicians throughout the US, Puerto Rico and Canada.

For more information on Telcom & Data call 800-335-0229.

Do you need communications from your schools adminstrative offices to the classrooms? Here are is a quick read on how to set one up. First off a school paging system is a necessity for safety reasons. A bell system doesn’t really provide detailed information during an emergency. Also a school paging system should provide communications from the classroom back to the office.
Setting up a system is much easier than it might seem. First you need to figure out how many zones you might need. A zone is an area that can include classrooms, lunch rooms, gymnasium and other common areas including hallways and outdoor gathering areas.

There are school paging systems available from Bogen Communications that can handle anything from a large school district to a small school under 25 zones or classrooms very cost effectively.

A school paging system requirements should include: 2 way talk back and monitor feature so teachers and administrative offices can communicate back and forth, all zone page to announce to all zones. Audio in puts for music, Time Tone for start and stop class schedules, and should have Microphone inputs.

Classrooms should use a wall mount speaker or ceiling speaker with a call switch. A speaker when wired to the control unit provides two way communications when connected to a call switch.

Speaker wire must be run or be existing from the adminstrative office back to each classroom. Speaker wire should be a standard 18 gauge. Each class room will have a connection on the back of the intercom counsole.

For more information on school paging systems please visit www.bogen-paging.com or call 800-335-0229

From the Desk of Ricardo Trinidad

Looking to implement a conference bridge but don’t have the infrastructure in house to handle the traffic? Colocating a conference bridge to a central office or data center can provide you with tons of bandwidth or TDM type circuits for a lot less then bring in circuits to your office. A colocation center is a type of data center or carrier hotel where different companies can set up servers, telecommunications equipment or network gear at central location. These colocation centers are set up like your local central office with lots of fiber, redundancy, fail over, battery back up and power generation to keep mission critical servers up and running. The pricing trade off , when deciding if colocation is good for your application, is monthly rack space rental versus loop fee. The loop fee is the monthly reoccurring cost that your phone company is going to charge to bring a T1/PRI or DS3 type circuit into your office. A loop fee can run around or over $ 300.00 per month for a typical T1. Rack space can run slightly less for a 4 U server. When considering a larger application with multiple circuits lo-location becomes more affordable.

We recently looked at Broadvox for a customer who wanted to implement a 500 port conference call system. When comparing the pricing of a DS3 circuit delivered to the customer’s location versus a co-location the cost was overwhelmingly in favor of co-location. The savings was around 40% of the overall monthly reoccurring charges.

Other advantages of colocating your conference bridge can be security and geo location. Having a conference bridge located in Dallas in a colocation center might prove a safer location then having one located near Gulf of Mexico in Houston.

Many hosted conference call providers us the same model when setting up a large conference solution. For more information of conferencing or implementing an in house audio conference bridge check out www.conference-bridge.net or call 800-335-0229

From the Desk of Ricardo Trinidad

An in house teleconference call solution can dramatically reduce conference costs over hosted conferencing. The problem with reducing long term conferencing costs can be the upfront costs to implement a solution. The ROI on a typical teleconference solution can be around 12 months which is fast but many times a company may not have the available cash in capital equipment budgets and end up staying with a more expensive hosted conference call solution using operating funds.
Software based conference call systems offer the lowest cost of ownership of any type of Conference Bridge. Software based conference bridges such as the Wyde Voice system does not use expensive proprietary hardware or platform to process conference calls. Instead the Wyde Voice solution relies on very effective software. A software based system can offer a huge advantage over typical conference systems in that they offer a more cost effective solution with scalability for growth.

Software based teleconferencing systems rely on SIP trunking to process calls helping to further reduce conference calls. Sip trunks typically offer a very low cost per minute and plans offer calling plans that include local and long distance for a flat rate.

Many of the businesses using this type of technology are hosted conference call companies that offer low and sometimes “free” conference call services.

For more information on teleconferencing systems please visit www.conference-bridge.net. Or call 800-335-0229.

From the desk of Ricardo Trinidad

Did your Polysom SoundStation stop working? If you have a Polycom SoundStation conference phone and it does not seem to be working check out the power supply. The power supply for Sound Station and Sound Station Premier can stop working with out giving any signs of trouble before going out completely. Instead of an expensive repair check out the power supply. If the power supply seems to be cold to the touch that maybe a sign that the power supply is not functioning. Power supplies usually produce a little heat. Polycom sells a universal replacement power supply for all SoundStations including Premier and SoundStation2.

Purchase your SoundStation univeral power supply here http://www.conferencing-products.com/catalog/product/2200-16020-001.aspx

Can’t find your voice mail password? Like a lot of companies these days people have come and go often with password information. Telcom & Data offers password reset services for Lucent and Avaya Audix and Intuity Audix voice mail systems. Losing an admin password will stop you from making the smallest of changes on the voice mail system from adding a users or deleting a user. Basically all programming functionality is locked out without the Admin password and login. In most cases Telcom & Data techs are able to get in the Audix system remotely and in a few minutes able to reset the passwords to default.

Telcom & Data can also provide complete maintenance and repair services on all Audix and Intuity Audix voice mail platforms. Repair turn around services usually take just one or two days from the time we receive the system to the time we send it back out. All work is guaranteed. For more information visit www.voice-mail.org or call 800-335-0229

Just because you bought for your Lucent phone system in the 90s doesn't mean you can't get help. Telcom & Data specializes in phone system troubleshooting, programming and installation. Ricardo Trinidad the President and CEO of Telcom & Data said in a recent interview that “older phone systems are like classic cards and there are still parts available for most systems". Telcom & Data specializes in new and refurbished phone systems from AT&T, Lucent and Avaya. Telcom & Data maintains complete the complete Lucent phone system library of manuals and most are available on line from www.avaya-manuals.com. Telcom & data charges as low as $ 70.00 for 1/2 hour of support. Many issues with support can come from a phone system losing memory due to a electrical outage. Telcom & Data can provide fast remote or onsite technical support. For more information on Lucent phone system troubleshooting call 800-335-0229 or visit on line at www.telcom-data.com