Technology upgrades are everyone's responsibility

Technology upgrades are an unfortunate part of life - and when it comes to telephone management systems, they are non-negotiable if quality is to be maintained. Telephony solution specialist provider SS Telecoms is making this point strongly in the South African market with respect to its SS-10 range of least cost routing products.

"Cellphone networks have been systematically upgrading their network towers, and this obviously has an impact on the telecoms systems used by the market in general," says Kevin Greig, SS Telecoms Marketing Manager. "At SS Telecoms, the tower upgrades saw issues arising with our SS-10 TC-35i module, where certain clients were experiencing a high amount of dropped calls and reduced speech quality, especially in heavily congested areas. This is due to the tower switching to half-rate to accommodate more calls, but it also deploys a codec technology, Adaptive Multi-Rate (AMR), to improve the speech quality at the lower bandwidth, which is not supported by the older TC-35i module, resulting in the abovementioned conditions."

SS Telecoms replaced the TC-35i device with the newer, AMR-compatible MC-55i to resolve the issue, which has been successfully integrated into most client operations.

"The only issue we're still dealing with is customers looking to buy second-hand equipment," says Greig. "It's not viable to buy second-hand SS10 TC-35i modules and expect them to operate successfully. You have to install the SS10 MC55i if you want to avoid degraded service conditions. We're trying to communicate this as much as we can in the market. Unfortunately, technology upgrades are a part of business life we all have to deal with, and take responsibility for. Quality can't be maintained with old equipment."

Those seeking further information or support should visit www.sstelecoms.com.