Phone of the Day: Zeb’s General Store – North Conway, NH

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While I am on a (much needed) vacation, I found this general store in the heart of downtown North Conway, on NH route 16.

This general store is a quarter century old and 1991 was actually not a general store. The store itself is set to an old fashioned theme. Staff told me that they acquired antiques over the years to give it it’s classic appearance. Another store about 13 years ago not to far away in the rural area had changed owners and had modernized it, turned away locals and changed management. That’s a complete no-no in business. Don’t fix what’s broken.

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Telephony 101: Centrex

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Central Exchange (or Centrex) is a service provided by many telephone carriers to deliver PBX or Key-like services via the telephone company (or Telco.) Little to no hardware is required at the customer end, unless its special adjuncts for digital telephones for power, etc. Regardless of the hardware, the “brain” lives out in the “cloud” so to speak at the central office. If it’s a government, or a large corporation, rarely are these actually installed on site.

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POTD – Local Kohls

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In today’s Phone Of the Day I recently took this picture of a Mitel IP 5212 set (if memory serves me)  at the Bedford NH store. This Kohls has a few IP telsets and boatloads of analog sets all across the sales floor. There are no sets near the fitting rooms. This store was built within the last five years around the time where perhaps Kohls was in a position of like a dysfunctional marriage: Do I stand with my man? (i.e. sticking to Avaya.) Don’t forget in early 2010s there was a bunch of doubt whether if Avaya would continue in supporting an overrated brand of telephony equipment. There is probably many reasons why in newer stores (of which popped up in my area, as their stores came to my area around 2002 – of which the Norstar 7200s are still in use in those locations) and other reasons such as higher maintenance contracts if you go through Avaya directly and the change of the user interface. Continue reading →

POTD: Whole Foods Market Bedford, New Hampshire

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In recent weeks, the world’s newest Whole Foods Market opened in Bedford, NH. Built on top of the legendary Wayfarer Inn (known more during the Primary Election years), it’s also within hundreds of feet of the now torn down Macy’s.

As proof from Joe the UCX Guy from Chicago, many Whole Foods stores are Cisco shops. Interestingly, the WFM in Nashua, just miles on the Everett Turnpike, is wired for TDM telephony using Toshiba’s Strata system (opened in 2014 to replace a former Market Basket.) Building was totally gutted and rebuilt mostly from the ground up.

The store in Bedford is mixed with 7942s and the 6902s at the cashier’s lane. Paging works, as teenage girls don’t know how to lower their octaves and learn how to page professionally.

The 7900s are still in the market, despite the more cheaper quality sets being deployed more and more. The 7900s are in a depreciation mode. Current generations are all multi lines, Java based and/or colored displays and I was surprised to see a 7942 because I believe its End of Sale.

I snapped two pictures, one showing how much characters you can use to describe your telephone extension. If the characters can’t fit on the top black colored indication bar, it will break the description up in two screens

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Personally, these devices are just “endpoints” – they are PCs acting as telephones. Sure Mitel, and Avaya and others sell the same thing (and acts the same way), but for sales people or the accountants, its just another device attached to the Internet and it shouldn’t be treated special like a office telephone. These phones are not easy to manage outside of expensive Cisco solutions or if you like to code and reverse engineer – be my guest! I feel like the 7900s were always a 2554 with Internet connectivity and a great audio quality of its SCCP signaling.

Other than that, Cisco just keeps on winning on selling “free” gear and report them as “profits” by smooching up to the CIOs and heads of IT departments at the Fortune 500 companies. You think I am kidding???

POTD: Ralph Lauren 5th Avenue Store

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From little of what I know about Ralph Lauren, it appears they are an Avaya Red shop in some capacity (Joe the UCX Guy featuring an enterprise class) and my local outlet using a Partner (or I should use it in air quotes.)

I have my own opinions of Mister Ralph. a) I can never afford his stuff (the local Macy’s is once in a blue moon) b) I find it more suitable for older people (that Denim and Supply line, I mean really?) if not for older people then more Country Club-types. And of course c) he legally changed his last name from a borderline expletive to allegedly a film crush with the now late Lauren Bacall? Also am I supposed to be pronouncing his name like the female given name or the long e at the end?

Well anyways, here is a Siemens set taken from the sales floor on Saturday. The interesting question would be is did they go to Siemens or were they legacy ROLM users?

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On the other hand here are some sets I didn’t (or wasn’t able to) capture but noticed

The Times Square Aeropostale uses an Avaya Blue Norstar system. For many years the non flagship Aeropostale stores used some analog Centrex, MPLS, or maybe VOIP terminated to analog phone service, up until the last couple months they had fallen into the Cisco bandwagon. Aeropostale is doing very lousy and is in danger of ether going out of business or being sold. Friday’s close was around a couple US dimes. What turned me away from there was all the shirts having these stupid embroidered fabric that is better for little kids. It’s hard to wash, then you have “loose” fabric, etc.

A Ruby Tuesday on the outskirts of Times Square had a Norstar system. (Nice service while I had lunch with the mother.)

The Apple Store on 5th Avenue (lousy service just like if you’re in the burbs. Another topic for another day) had clerks carrying around Cisco 7921 like wireless sets. This isn’t a surprise. Cisco has crept its way through Apple over the years, and now it’s gone to their VOIP or telephones. Most Apple Stores are still an Avaya IP Office shop with most of the wired sets tucked into drawers on the sales floors.

A Best Buy where I got better service, downtown a few blocks had Cisco.

The operations for the Fox News Channel still uses Avaya 8400 and 6400 sets. From what I know at the 1211 6th Ave facility, that the few first floors of the building are for FNC, Floors 7 to 8 (or 9?) is for The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s.

Once located at the World Financial Center (using a Meridian 1 system), they went to VOIP when the built the new facilities within 1211. An interesting note, on a blog I once found a picture of  Roger Ailes, the head of FNC having both an 8434 and a Cisco set. Without getting into a political discussion, it would not be a surprise he has a direct line to a paper that could favor his views. (WSJ is a joke today and I am a big fan of markets and corporate news.)

I did not set foot inside 30 Rock, but I’ve seen on MSNBC on cable with more and more Cisco 8900 sets. It’s apparent that NBC wants to do away with Avaya at least at their New York operations more and more. They relocated their Southland facilities from Avaya in Burbank to Cisco in Universal City 2 years ago, their other hubs in Texas has been wired to Cisco and I can go on and on seeing yet another customer of Avaya Red disappear.

Many financial institutions are using Cisco (walked by Capital One Bank, TD Bank, JPMorgan, etc.)

POTD: Macy’s 34th Street – Avaya Red 8403 DCP Terminal

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Yesterday, I posted pics from my trip to Manhattan on Saturday. To my surprise I saw a lot of Avaya Red terminals despite Cisco selling VOIP sets like they are generic IP devices that corporate accounts pay little to none (allegedly) for.

The 8403 is a display-less set, designed for “walk up users” (to use a modern day cliche) or people who do not need functionality of a fully blown 8405 or 8410 terminal. The set supports up to 3 call appearances and if a user desperately needs features with indicators, one can program a feature (or two) but the set would act as a single appearance terminal.

It’s cousin set is the 7401, because it shares similarities to the 12 button personal features assignment. Someone can have up to 12 functions for abbreviated dialing, features, etc by hitting the Feature button and hit a single digit on the dial pad. There wasn’t a similar set till the late 2000s when Avaya released two sets, the 1403 and 1603 both for DCP and IP respectively, but ironically this require both to be run behind an IP Office, and not their enterprise PBX systems. It’s not to say one could reload firmware with the 1603 with some SIP firmware (which I believe it can work) and run it against Avaya’s SES services, and claim it to be a generic SIP set. These models furthers more irony because the 8403 was incompatible with Merlin systems anyways.

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Phone of the Day: Avaya Red 7400 Series Voice Terminal – Macy’s 34th Street

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Yours truly was Live from New York yesterday. Put it this way, I saw more Avaya Red sets this time around than Ciscos. A couple Avaya Blues here and there.

I don’t know much of the history of the original Macy’s. Macy’s went under 2 decades ago, and was sequentially boughtout by Federated Department stores that went on a buying spree of regional department stores; then in 2005 made their big buyout of the May Department Store chain of brands. Between the Federated and May buyouts Macy’s was in almost every mid sized city than prior to. Most of the Macy’s around where I live used to be the brands of Jordan Marsh and Filene’s both using/used ROLM CBX switches.

What’s interesting is I’ve been to Jordan Marsh/Macy’s stores and they had resemblance to the flagship 34th Street store, while former Filenes still has resemblance of the pre-Macy’s buyout, but by default all first level stores has that signature all white look. More non telephony related subjects to this store I set foot for the first time on the above link.

Now from what I can tell Macy’s uses an Avaya Red PBX. This one appears to go back in the System 75 days. Now I didn’t see if this thing worked, because in Release 14 (branded as 4.x)  of their enterprise PBX system, they depreciated the 7400s because the four-wire cards carried a lot of legacy code (from what I’ve read on the list serves, just dumping the 7400 DCP drivers gave Avaya some million lines of code removed.)

This particular model I forget, because AT&T made various models in the 10 year period, it may be a 7410 BIS set. Also, just because the 8400s released in the early 1990s, it was not a surprise to still have a part number (known as Comcodes or PECs) – I believe some models of the 7400 were still orderables in the first year of the Avaya spinoff (early 2000-late 2001.) If you were still on the 7400s at that point, Avaya did want you to go to the 6400 series (crap sets.)

More to come throughout the week.

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Telephony 101: Teletypewriter/TTY/TDD

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A teletypewriter is a special device that was typically known as the Telecommunications Device for the Deaf or TDD. These devices act as typewriters that can carry special signals to provide text based communications over voice telephone lines. This was the beginning of using data over the telephone lines.

This technology was invented in the 1960s, nearly a century after Alexander Graham Bell attempted to invent the telephone for this audience, which obviously went for the masses who could speak or hear. The Teletypewriter (known as TTY) was initially referred to leased line that provided automatic printing such as news wire services or even for a console access to mainframes. (In fact, if a customer was very frugal dumb terminals for some were too expensive so computing would result in the typewriter that would automatically “printout” what was coming off the “screen”. A user would respond to commands by typing it into the typewriter which then would relay it to the computer.)

TDD/TTY uses a standardized protocol that basically sends various tones through the telephone lines so the other end would receive the message. According to Wikipedia (use with caution) the change to IP in the traditional phone cloud, would make these devices unusable (including the 500 Rotary telephones) because the complexity of converting landline networks to work in “native” cyber (or packet) worlds. While VOIP enables some analog communications, the move to IP would be easier to service providers to tell users to just send iMessages, SMS, Tweet, IM or other text based technologies instead.

According to various sources, TDD is separate from TTY in the technological sense, and speech impaired users that may have acquired brain disorders; a non verbal, but high functioning form of the autism spectrum disorder; cerebral palsy or other types of speech disorders) are basically non existent users. Or so you think. It’s not to say that people who aren’t deaf can’t use this technology and people with speech impairments have ether used TTY or all the other IP based communications like IM, Web, social media and text messaging.

Because of the similarities of the two platforms, here at The Museum, I believe the term should be referred as TTY as non verbal people are actually disabled users to any telephony technologies as well. Using “TTY” in the generic sense would enable inclusion to all disabled users of this technology.

My Collection: A Definity AUDIX Board!

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Update: 02-23-15 at 9:20 pm We’ve gots some problems… Presently tried to follow all the instructions but the board appears to be booting up but the ASA and even TUTTY (Putty + AT&T Terminal) clients are stuck in the BSOD. According to historic documentation, the LEDs are working as they should after boot, so maybe something failed at the connector side. I sure hope I didn’t “break” it…

So I got another surprise gift from Jason that was sent on President’s Day. I just received it a couple hours ago. This Definity AUDIX board is an integrated voice mail system for the Definity platform. These are no longer available and were designed in small environments. It was on the market for most of the 90s and probably up to 2001. The replacement would be an external PC or now a Modular Messaging running on a server class PC or an Aura virtual appliance. The beauty of this tiny board is it gave customers in small sites the power of the bigger AUDIX system. And hopefully I can hear the AUDIX lady once I get into the thing!

So much for that cutover back to the Cisco huh?