VoIP Phone Glossary

Attendant (Auto Attendant)  An automatic response system, such as a voice presenting options such as press 2 for sales, 5 for Alex, etc., which handles incoming calls and sends them to the appropriate phone or message. Auto attendant features, often referred to as Phone Trees, Call Trees, auto-receptionist or even virtual receptionist, simply route calls to the correct extension or agent within a company. Auto attendants  can only route calls to predetermined extensions. Settings can be configured for day or night modes, or even holiday hours, but overall the system is somewhat limited in its capabilities.

Busy Lamp Field or BLF is a light on an IP Phone or a colored indicator next to a name in a softphone or web client, that tells you whether another extension is busy or not.

Call Centers, depending on what specifically you're looking for them to do, take more time and design to implement as they often involve nesting Auto Attendants and Hunt Groups.  We would need to know how you'd want the call flow to work in order to properly build the call center to meet the needs of the university as a whole, or specific department in the university. Some call centers include desktop software that is logged into and used to direct calls.

Call Tree See Auto Attendant.

DID  Direct Inward Dialing  A service that allows an enterprise to allocate individual phone numbers to each person within its PBX system.

Hunt Group is the method of distributing phone calls from a single telephone number to a group of several phone lines. Specifically, it refers to the process or algorithm used to select which line will receive the call. In Linear Hunting, calls are always delivered to the first line, unless it is busy — then the second, third, and remaining lines are considered in succession. In Circular Hunting, the calls are distributed "round-robin". If a call is delivered to line 1, the next call goes to 2, the next to 3. The succession throughout each of the lines continues even if one of the previous lines becomes free. When the end of the hunt group is reached, the hunting starts over at the first line. Lines are skipped only if they are still busy on a previous call.

IVR Interactive Voice Response see Auto Attendant.

POTS Plain Old Telephone System  The familiar single phone line, single phone number system that has been in existence for many years.

PSTN Public Switched Telephone Service  The combination of local, long-distance and international carriers that make up the worldwide telephone network.

Ring Group is a group of phone numbers, extensions or physical telephones that ring together, simultaneously, when one extension number or extension is dialed.

RJ-11 Registered jack telephone connector. RJ-11 is the common connector for plugging a telephone into the wall and the handset into the telephone.

RJ-45   An 8 wire connector used to connect Ethernet connections in computers, routers and other Internet devices.  This connector is slightly larger than a (RJ-11) telephone connector.

Simultaneous Ring see Ring Group

SIP Session Initiation Protocol  is a signaling protocol for Internet conferencing, telephony, and instant messaging.  It is a request-response protocol, dealing with requests from clients and responses from

Speed Call Speed Calling allows subscribers to program shortcuts for telephone numbers to dial them quickly with just one or two digits. This service is being phased out at SUNY Fredonia as part of the phone transition project.

Speed Dial When a phone button is programmed with a number for a single touch dial.

Switch  A switch is a device that keeps a record of the MAC addresses of all devices connected to it and then channels incoming data from any of multiple input ports to the specific output port that will take the data toward its intended destination.

Voicemail to Email or Voicemail Transcription is an incredibly useful feature that will automatically send users a written transcript of any voicemail left on their system.

VoIP Voice over Internet Protocol The transmission of voice over the Internet as digital packets rather than the traditional circuit-committed protocols of the PSTN.  VoIP uses real-time protocol (RTP) to help ensure that the packets get delivered in a timely way.