Blog

Notes for people who keep phone systems running

Practical writing on call analytics, legacy PBX life support, telecom costs, and the occasional war story. No growth-hacking listicles.

Product

How to Track 911 Calls Across Multiple Buildings and Campuses

A 911 call goes out from a university residence hall at 1:40 a.m. The PSAP has it and dispatch is rolling. Your own security team, two minutes away with master keys and a …

MAY 2026 · 6 MIN READ

Diagram of campus buildings wired to a central system that locates a 911 call to a building and floor and routes alerts to security, dispatch, and responders

Diagram of the call accounting pipeline: phones into a PBX, CDR records normalized and rated against carrier plans, producing invoices, fraud alerts, and reports

Product

The Complete Guide to PBX Call Accounting in 2026

Call accounting is the discipline of pricing and attributing every call that touches your phone system. Your PBX already writes a …

MAR 2026 · 7 MIN READ

Diagram of inbound calls where answered queues reach agents but one missed call flows into a dollar meter dripping money, illustrating revenue leaking from missed calls

Product

How Much Does a Missed Call Cost? Putting a Dollar Value on Your Abandonment Rate

Most call reports will tell you that you missed 212 calls last month. They won’t tell you whether that figure is a rounding …

JAN 2026 · 5 MIN READ $Side-by-side diagram of an on-premise PBX room versus a hosted cloud setup, each with five-year cost line items feeding a central comparison calculator$ Product

Keep the PBX or Go Hosted? The Honest Total-Cost Math for a 100-User System

Vendors selling the hosted side wrote most of the “on-prem vs hosted” cost comparisons you’ll find. The tell is …

DEC 2025 · 6 MIN READ

Diagram of one highlighted extension on a PBX bursting calls to international destinations, with CDR analysis flagging the anomaly on a cost meter

Engineering

How to Spot a Compromised Extension: Calling Patterns That Mean Trouble

Toll fraud kept running while the security industry’s attention moved to ransomware. Industry groups still estimate …

OCT 2025 · 5 MIN READ

Diagram of inbound calls through a PBX split between agents who answer and calls lost to voicemail or hang-ups, with an answer-rate gauge showing the team's percentage

Product

Call Answer Rate: What Percentage of Calls Does Your Team Actually Pick Up — and What's Normal?

Ask a manager what percentage of inbound calls their team answers and the confident reply is “oh, almost all of them.” …

AUG 2025 · 4 MIN READ

Diagram of an Avaya Aura Communication Manager exporting stacks of CDR records through a collector and parser into a database, dashboards, and per-call counters

Engineering

How to Export and Analyze Avaya Aura CDR Records

Avaya Aura Communication Manager has produced some of the most detailed call records in the industry for decades, and some of the …

JUN 2025 · 6 MIN READ

Diagram of a PBX CDR stream classified into 911, toll-fraud, and missed-call alerts, each delivered to its own Slack channel on a desktop, with email crossed out

Engineering

How to Send PBX Alerts to Slack: 911 Calls, Toll Fraud, and Missed-Call Thresholds

Email is where alerts go to die. A 911 call notification that lands in an inbox between a newsletter and a meeting invite has …

APR 2025 · 5 MIN READ

Diagram of telecom cost line items (hardware, trunks, maintenance, licenses) and call volume from the PBX feeding one cost-per-call gauge and a budget report

Product

Cost per Call: The One Metric That Justifies Your Whole Telecom Budget

Telecom budget reviews land on the same question each year: what does this money buy us? Line-item answers (trunk fees, …

FEB 2025 · 5 MIN READ

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