​This is a follow-up to last week’s post about the July 2nd Internet outage in Charleston. I met with the local Regional Channel Manager from WOW! Business, Jamison Cary. He offered additional information about the cause of the outage and shared WOW!’s actions to handle future service-affecting events.
 
​Jamison explained the interruption occurred

On July 2, 2019 the unthinkable happens for many Internet customers in the Charleston metro area. Century Link reports that a fiber optic cable servicing parts of the southeastern United States was damaged. This affected local Internet Service Providers (ISP), WOW, Comcast, and Verizon. Customers were out of service for up to 12 hours.

​It is important for businesses to protect themselves from significant Internet downtime.  The obvious

Tom Farley's Telephone History Series
Telephone History Part 1 -- to 1830 Introduction

On March 10, 1876, in Boston, Massachusetts, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Thomas Watson fashioned the device itself; a crude thing made of a wooden stand, a funnel, a cup of acid, and some copper wire. But these simple parts and the equally simple first telephone call -- "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you!" -- belie a complicated past. Bell filed his application just hours before his competitor, Elisha Gray, filed notice to soon patent a telephone himself. What's more, though neither man had actually built a working telephone, Bell made his telephone operate three weeks later using ideas outlined in Gray's Notice of Invention, methods Bell did not propose in his own patent.

Today begins our 25th year of business service. We plan to celebrate throughout the year. We give thanks for our loyal customers and partners who helped us to reach this milestone.
 
See the transformation of our brand in this short video. We had a humble beginning. Rather than purchasing business cards for individuals, we had a “write in the name” style! We weren’t sure this experiment was going to work.
 
Kevin choose the color green to represent money; however, in 2011 it changes to the red globe when he designed new business cards. The three bars in the bi-color globe represent the “Tri” in Trident. In 2012, we had to purchase a new van and the only that had what we wanted was red. The gray was added to compliment the reds.  

The phone can be a major interruption without the added stress of answering automated junk calls. It is hard to separate the chaff from the wheat. The article, “Why Robocallers Win Even If You Don’t Answer” by Sara Krouse of The Wall Street Journal, describes the complications to resolve the problem of unwanted robocalls. She states, 

A question that I often field from customers during our Hosted PBX deployments is: "Can the phone ring differently when receiving an internal call?" This is called distinctive ring, a feature that is available for most premise based systems. For our typical deployments we use Yealink T4X series phones because of their durability and feature set. Yealink T4X phones allow for distinctive ring not just for internal calls but distinctive ring based on a local directory. This directory can be configured through the phone itself or it can be provisioned to each phone being deployed. Typically we use the second option -- this allows for a consistent user experience, all the phones on the site work the exact same way. In this post I will explain how to add numbers to this directory from your phone as well as detail the process for provisioning a directory to all phones for other VOIP installation professionals.