Does Your Communications Network Have a Traffic Cop? It Should.

Did you know there's a big similarity between the Interstate Highway system and your business' phone lines? It's true. In fact, just as a civil engineer determines the number of lanes a highway must have to accommodate the number of cars during rush hour, a properly engineered communications network has enough lines so calls are never blocked and you never pay for lines you don't use.

If you haven't evaluated the engineering of your communications network, there are four areas to consider: determining the busy hour, trending, forecasting, and calculating.

DETERMINE THE "BUSY" HOUR

Determining the busy hour is perhaps the most important thing for you to understand about your business' communications. Luckily, it is as simple as it sounds. Knowing the busy hour(s) is important because you always want to engineer your network around your busy hour to ensure there are enough open lines; otherwise callers will receive a fast busy or "all circuits busy" recording. In addition, this will help you staff accordingly. What good is having enough lines to handle your inbound call volume if there's no one to answer the call?

TRENDING

Similar to knowing when your busy hour occurs, your business is likely to have other trends that can affect your communications. Day-of-the-week, week-of-the-month, holidays and, depending on your business, seasonal factors may all play a part in your traffic trends. It's also a good idea to know your average call duration, as understanding these trends will enable you to prepare for them. So, to expand upon the previous principle, always engineer your network around your busiest hour on your busiest day during your busiest season.

FORECASTING

Forecasting can be a challenge, but if you keep good data, it will be accurate and very useful. Unfortunately, there aren't any crystal balls. However, to make sure your predictions are as accurate as possible, the trick is to have enough data to ensure the margin of error is low. In fact, the more data you have, the more accurate the forecast.

Why is this important? If you maintain a marginal number of lines for your traffic, you will want to watch for any changes to your traffic patterns. By being aware, you can proactively add lines, or perhaps more Internet bandwidth, to accommodate more traffic. Finally, if you have a T1 and aren't already using all 24 channels, you could maximize your efficiency by adding other services onto the circuit that you already have in use.

If you are starting a new business, or do not have historic data, you will need to make some difficult assumptions about how many people will simultaneously be on the phone, using the web, or accessing a file server over your Wide Area Network (WAN). As a general rule, your safest bet is to estimate high and then re-evaluate after you've collected some data.

CALCULATING

Most telephone networks today rely upon a formula that was published in 1909 by the Danish engineer, A.K. Erlang in The Theory of Probabilities and Telephone Conversations. In this work, Erlang demonstrated how he determined the probability of whether a caller would have to wait to make a call outside the village. Because of this landmark theory, an "Erlang" has become known as the unit of traffic measurement.

The three main Erlang traffic-modeling formula are:

> Erlang B - Most frequently used formula that determines how many lines are required to handle busy hour traffic; assumes that any blocked calls are immediately cleared.

> Extended Erlang B - Similar to Erlang B, but assumes that N percent of blocked calls will immediately try again.

> Erlang C - Used mostly in call centers where callers that are not immediately answered are put into a queue.

Calculating bandwidth for data communications, while simpler math, is not as straightforward because many factors can influence the bandwidth required - from the architecture of your network, to the equipment and protocols you use, to the applications themselves. Below is a simple example calculating the bandwidth needs of a single host, which includes a web server containing a single 4k document, eleven 10k images, and one 14k image. (Note: This example only shows the bandwidth needed to serve the pages themselves and does not necessarily depict the additional bandwidth required for overhead, retransmissions, etc.)

CONCLUSION

These four concepts, while they may initially seem complex, can help ensure your communications are both efficient and cost-effective. For managing your communications, you may be able to get reports from your phone system, from network monitors that you may have employed on your data network, or from other sources including your invoice. Of course, your communications provider can and should lend a helpful hand in determining and delivering capacity that's right for your business.

ATX offers clients a free online service, ATX InsightŪ, which gives you the power to manage your communications needs over the Internet. For more information on this superior account management tool please visit: www.atxinsight.com.

To learn more about ATX, please visit http://www.atx.com or call 800-220-ATX2.

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