Glossary

ACD (Average Call Duration)

ACD is a quality metric used by telephony providers to show the average length of a call made over their network. Magic Telecom has a high ACD which suggests that few calls are dropped or abandoned due to quality issues.

ASR (Answer / Seizure Ratio)

The Answer / Seizure Ratio is a metric used to measure the quality of a telephony company's network. It is calculated by dividing the number of successfully answered calls by the total number of calls attempted.

A high ASR like Magic Telecom's indicates a reliable network, since most calls that are attempted are answered. A low ASR may suggest a poor quality network, though it can be heavily influenced by user behaviour since busy signals and unanswered or rejected calls count as failures.

CLEC (competitive local exchange carrier)

A CLEC in the United States, is a telecommunications provider company (sometimes called a "carrier") competing with other, already established carriers (generally the incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC)).

Codec

A codec is used to compress and decompress an audio signal before transmitting it over the network. There are a number of different speech codecs used by VoIP carriers. Magic Telecom supports the G.729a and G.723 codecs for all of our routes, as well as G.711u, G.711a, and G.726 for most.

ILEC (incumbent local exchange carrier)

An ILEC is a local telephone company in the United States that was in existence at the time of the breakup of AT&T into the Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs), also known as the "Baby Bells." The ILEC is the former Bell System or Independent Telephone Company responsible for providing local telephone exchange services in a specified geographic area. GTE was the second largest ILEC after the Bells, but it has since been absorbed into Verizon, a RBOC. ILECs compete with competitive local exchange carriers (CLEC). When referring to the technical communities ILEC is often used just to mean a telephone provider.

NPANXX

The North American Numbering Plan (NANP) governs the managment of telephone numbers for the Public Switched Telephone Networks in North America (Canada, USA, Carribean, and territories) within the international country code prefix '+1'.

Origination

Refers to calls that originate in the PSTN public switched telephone network and are carried to their destination over the Internet. A VoIP call is initiated between two points, the initiation point is known as originator and the destination point is known as terminator.

PDD (Post-Dial Delay)

Post-Dial Delay is the time it takes to receive feedback after a user has finished dialling. This feedback can be in the form of a dial tone, a recorded announcement, or the call being abandoned.

Magic Telecom has a low PDD which gives an improved user experience. Consumers are generally used to the PSTN's short PDD and often react negatively when there is a long pause after dialling.

PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network)

The PSTN is the network that makes up the world's traditional telephone systems. Magic Telecom provides services that allow VoIP companies to terminate calls onto the PSTN.

Termination

Magic Telecom's call termination services allow other carriers and telephony companies to pass their VoIP calls onto the PSTN so that they can be answered over a traditional phone line.

VoIP

VoIP is a specialised protocol used to transmit voice data over the Internet. It is also commonly used to refer to the act of transmitting voice, and the many related services that have built up around it.

A VoIP provider is a company like Magic Telecom, that is set up to sell consumer or business-to-business telephony services.