On Call Central Launches Alaska Specific Services
Today we are pleased to announce the launch of an On Call Central server dedicated to accounts in the State of Alaska. All current On Call Central users in Alaska will now access their accounts at https://your-domain.oncallcentral-ak.com (as opposed to the plain oncallcentral.com domain) and are being issued 907 area code phone numbers.
We Didn’t Do This Alone
We would like to thank several parties for their assistance and technical guidance in navigating the complexities of the Alaska market. Foremost, we would like to thank the people at Tekmate, in particular Alan Zirkle, Buddy Gant, Jared Armstrong, and Shawn Fuller. Not only do these gentlemen know their stuff, but they have been very generous in providing us test machines on which we have been able to optimize our application. We would also like to thank the people at the TelAlaska NOC and the engineers at Alaska Communications Systems for their considerable help. Last, we would like to thank the engineers at Sangoma Technologies, in particular Marc Celsie and Moises Silva, for their assistance in configuring their hardware, which powers core features of this new roll-out.
Why Do This?
The reasons for dedicating resources to Alaska are several, and have become obvious in the past few months. First, Alaska is the only rate center in the United States where major voice over IP providers do not yet issue local phone numbers. We wanted to be able to offer Alaska clients 907 area code numbers, and without establishing a physical infrastructure in Alaska, we would be stuck issuing out of state numbers and 1-800 numbers to clients. Though not a major issue in most cases, we have encountered at least one instance where the lack of a local number made it difficult for clients to dial into their On Call Central account (e.g. when being prompted for a long distance access code at a hospital phone terminal). Second, we were encountering intermittent latency issues that rendered some VoIP calls unusable. This was a fundamental engineering issue resulting from the significant physical distance between Alaska and our Dallas data center. For our Alaska customers, a two party voice call was making a ~10,000 mile round trip between Anchorage and Texas.
What Did We Do?
To resolve these two issues, we embarked on an engineering project that involved, among other things, reconfiguring the telephony portion of the On Call Central code application. Specifically, we moved these customers away from VoIP-based telephony to a system that uses a voice T1 (aka PRI) line. Overall, this entailed what is for us a major investment in time and money, but we expect it to pay off in increased reliability and high quality audio.
MGMA Annual Conference Demo
We just spent the last four days in Denver at the MGMA Annual Conference and received great feedback from attendees. We performed so many demonstrations of the medical answering service software that we thought it would make sense to record a video demonstration make it available to those who wanted to share the On Call Central technology with their colleagues.
