Author: clickfo

POTD: Analog Sets, TRYP, Midtown Manhattan, NY

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This is the cordless phone at the hipster hotel I had stayed when I was in New York City back in October.  As you can tell it’s one of those Teledex, analog sets. No hotel I’ve ever stayed had any native phone system’s sets in the rooms. I guess it’s above my paygrade to stay at a five-star hotel that may have digital or IP sets. I do know the Teledex markets an ‘iPhone” (surprised that didn’t hit Apple’s or Cisco’s lawyers!) that’s a generic SIP phone that functions like an analog set but works on top of an IP network.

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POTD: Urban Outfitters – West 34th Street

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Being the Avaya Red fanboy that I am, I am always happy to see any phones from the legacy AT&T/Bell System days. As I have stated before, this vendor had 90%+ of the Fortune 500 and then lost it entirely with a company with legacy roots that was 125 years old.

Taken in October of 2017, I am unable to tell what set this is, it could be a 1416 or a 1616. The second digit model numbers  what type of signaling it does to make them ether be a “telephone” or a “terminal”. Please read the section on “voice terminals” to remind yourself why your desk phone is not actually that…

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POTD: TRYP Hotel, Midtown Manhattan

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In today’s installment of phones other than Cisco seen in The Big Apple, this was where I and my companion stayed during the week of the NY NAB Show. Known as TRYP (probably an acronym for “trip” though my mother called it T.R.Y.P. for a while) is a hipster themed hotel on West 35th between Seventh and Eighth. An independent franchise to Wyndham, this hotel is in one little building. I think it’s like a motel in a low rise building. There are fifteen stories and you can see the flagship New Yorker from the top.

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POTD: Tick Tock Diner, Midtown Manhattan, NY

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If you ever visit the West Side of Manhattan, and you like an awesome breakfast, go to the Tick Tock Diner, underneath the New Yorker on Eighth Ave between West 34th and 35th streets. Or should I say the iconic Art-Deco, classic mid 20th Century style of the Wyndham owned hotel? Anyways, I had a Smore French Toast.  Something along those lines…

Enough with food porn on The Museum, but you wanted to see their phones right?

Left looks like the one for the diner, a NEC set for their Electra line, and a Mitel 5330E VOIP set with a backlit display and perhaps a Gigabit Ethernet connection! This is probably used for the hotel communications, and for the use of room service. I can say Mitel is used at these clusters of hotels, because I stayed in TRYP, and I saw my phones on the front desk…

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POTD: B&H Store, New York City

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I’ve received many B&H catalogs ether as hand me downs, and runins with people on the West Coast, or in the mailings these days, but I never made it there till October. I’m familiar with J&R in the Lower Manhattan area though.

Located on the West Side of Manhattan, just a couple blocks away from the Garment District (the off Fifth Ave stores that go from West 34th & 5th to 35th and 8th. I made the visit since it was on the way to the Javits Center, for that fluke of an East Coast NAB Show. This place is a must if you like broadcast grade A/V equipment (the enterprise class for videographers, audio, what have you.) I got studio grade headphones there, and you can buy any professional and commercial class stuff there. And if you can’t make it to New York, you can go online.

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POTD: Jacob Javits Center, Upper West Side, Manhattan

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The Jacob Javits Center, located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the urban outskirts of New York City, is where conferences are held. Much less space than say the Las Vegas Convention Center. It’s comparable size like Connecticut’s or the ones in Boston. Unlike Vegas, people are rude, uptight and do not take any selfies with showgirls. They will tell you explicitly to “not tag” them.

This was taken in October at the fall NAB Show, the convention for the National Association of Broadcasters. Unlike my visit in April, there was nothing to write home about.  In fact I spent more time outside the Javits Center

This Guest Services desk shows a Cisco 8800 series VOIP set. However, throughout my visit, my first time ever visiting the city beyond twelve hours – I saw sets that weren’t just Cisco in various businesses and organizations.

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My Collection: Avaya Red 8410D Voice Terminal

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It’s that time of year, a start of a new [fiscal] year and now it’s time to take my recently repaired DSLR camera to take photos of all the equipment that I have collected.

To start, this is the 8410D Voice Terminal I got when I received my Definity switch in 2015

It supports up to ten call appearances, and depending on your vintage of the PBX, it can support up to fifteen features (the ones that active in green lamps) as down triangles on the 2 line display when pressing Menu. When AT&T marketed these terminals in the 1990s, the Menu functions was encouraged to the users to take advantage of the multi call appearances.

These sets can work in 2 wire or 4 wire environments, requiring a respective circuit card. There is no need to tip DIP switches or do any other setups, if the wiring and the card matches to the right set. You can plug this into a 4 wire then move it to another desk on a 2 wire.

The traditional wiring environment for four wires required conductors on the 1 and 3, and 4 and 5 pins. Later models that used two wiring only needed conductors on the 4 & 5. These sets could work on the original System 75 PBX with intervention of the administrator to mimic the 7410 set, while maximizing the potential with the display and Menu/feature button assignments.

The 8400 series while been discontinued by Avaya for a number of years, is still compatible with current PBX hardware if you use 2 wire boards and sets. Meanwhile 4-wire boards became unsupported in CM 4 (or the 14th release of the Definity system.)

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POTD: Avaya 4610 *One-X Quick Edition* IP set

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Back in 2013, I acquired an Avaya 4610 IP set. However, not to long after the acquisition, I’ve found out that this was a special version. A very strange one to say the least. I would’ve retuned this to the eBay seller as a “Not as Described” claim but I don’t like pulling that unless I really have to.

For a period of time from 2006 to 2008, Avaya marketed (albeit with limited fanfare) a peer to peer IP phone system called the One-X Quick Edition. To be honest, I never understood the brand.

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Telephony 101: On Voice Mail

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Some people love voice mail, many just hate it. Many are apparently so egotistical, they think it’s not worth listening to 2 minutes of a voice based message than a generic email.

People also think email is better, but do you know the history of voicemail?

if the answer is no, lets go down memory lane of Voice Mail.

Voicemail is often assumed to be an electronic answering machine on a server. While it’s true, its origins was almost similar to sending a letter or an email, just with spoken word.

The first indication of such language was in printed publications in 1877. A famous man named Thomas Edison with an invention called the phonograph. For the Gen-X audience and older, this is basically a record player. Millenials are probably familiar to just be cool for the latest trend. While it was well known for songs, the ability to record spoken word, as a way to replace letter writing had the possibility. The “voice mail” language was in the lexicon by the 1910s.

While the answering machine was invented in the 1960s, the ability to install these would be so cost prohibitive, and worse, a wiring nightmare. In the early 1970s, Motorola introduced pagers that provided one way voice messages that would be answered by an “answering center” (this in 2017 is completely archaic with the advent of digital telephony, automated attendants, in fact the size of these answering centers were the size of contact centers, which was not existent at the time.) These pagers used UHF signals and were often used for volunteer fire fighters, etc. In this sense, this could be considered as a voice message.

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