Dr. Nathan Vaccaro starts the telephone answering service after retiring from Dentistry having had a successful private practice. The original equipment was the mighty mite cord boards you may remember from 60s television and movies. We used a large spinning wheel to access hand written messages when clients called in to either check messages or respond to a page. The paging method used back in the eighties was either a tone pager or a voice pager. Customers would either receive a beep or voice message and called us for the information, subsequently we would initial the message as delivered. Each day we would make a numerical count of each client’s messages for billing purposes.
Our first upgrade was to the Amtelco EVE (electronic video exchange) and the Redcom switch. Amtelco created a multi operator system where everyone was physically connected the main computer. Thus the phrase “dumb terminal began”. Each operator worked at a station that was physically connected to the main computer system with video, keyboard and voice. The only additional hardware that was exterior to the system was the switch which was manufactured by Redcom. Calls were transferred through the switch on individual DID (direct inward dial) trunks and all outgoing calls were processed by POTS (plain old telephone service) lines. Calls were routed to operators through call classes and a dispatcher was created to deliver all messages. It was quite an innovation for our industry.
Amtelco then developed their own switch and partnered it with the existing EVE. Now all components were all located in a single computer cage with only operator stations connected to it. The advantage with the new platform was the eventual conversion to PRI (primary rate interface) service which gave a better grade of phone service with faster signaling. Once again calls were routed by call classes.
Infinity and FMDS (facsimile mail delivery system) were the next upgrade. Infinity was an evolution in the telephone answering service industry. It gave operators the ability to easily patch, email, fax or transfer calls. Now dispatchers were only required to keep track of the flow of calls and operators could provide many other functions. When Ultracomm (Amtelco’s proprietary facsimile and email product) came along we had the ability to email to a single or several recipients or fax to several numbers. Customers with more than one office were easily satisfied.
The next generation of telephone answering service was the Telescan Prism. Becoming my primary IT provider for my equipment allowed me to control all aspects of my platform. From account set up to call distribution all internal aspects of the platform are controlled by an administrator. We then also employed a double redundant internet connection to our Data Centers by having two local ISP providers and a wireless back up. This ensures that connectivity to our equipment will always be available.
After becoming familiar with the Telescan Prism we began to use the more powerful ProxMox servers and start virtualizing all our programs and servers. This has allowed us to become not only redundant locally in our Tampa Data Center but also utilize additional redundancy at our Atlanta Data Center, which is out of our geographic region and not affected by any local environmental or weather related event. With this kind of redundancy, we can provide true 24/7/365 service to our customers. With none of the local restraints or issues a problem for us to overcome we are now the most truly redundant service provider in the industry.
"As an established, knowledgable company in the industry, we hope you will call AAA Communications first when it comes to choosing your Tele-Messaging and Answering Service company."
Nathan J. Vaccaro Jr.
President
AAA Communications Inc.
