“We like to travel”

“We like to travel”
— seminar attendee during coffee break at a seminar

This reminded us that for many people with good jobs, training is part of the job – including traveling for it… and some people appreciate taking courses in interesting places so they can stay an extra day for a side trip.

In that spirit, here are a couple of outstanding free places to visit close to the Santa Clara BOOT CAMP in March:

1. Pescadero Beach. google maps
Just over the mountains that separate Silicon Valley from the Pacific Ocean is Pescadero Beach State Park and the Northern California coastline. The best part are the tide pools full of interesting things like anemones.
picture

If you are a good driver,
Pescadero Creek Road is a special experience
google maps navigation

Bonus: drive past Neil Young’s 9-square-mile ranch
he talks about before singing “Old Man”
google maps navigation

2. Redwood forest. google maps
The Big Basin Redwoods State Park is close by, a wonderful place to walk and regain your zen.
picture
tripadvisor

Cheers!

Tutorial: SIP Trunking

One of the newest service offerings from carriers is SIP Trunking.

Like many, many other pieces of jargon in the business, many people would like to understand just what exactly it is.

SIP is an acronym for Session Initiation Protocol. This is a standards-based method of setting up Voice over IP telephone calls.

A key thing to know about Voice over IP phone calls is that once the call is set up and two people are talking, their telephones exchange IP packets with digitized speech in them directly.

One person’s telephone creates an IP packet and puts the IP address of the other person’s telephone in the destination address field. This packet is forwarded by routers directly to the other person’s phone.

To be able to do this, it is necessary to know what the other person’s IP address is!

This is the main function performed by SIP: it is an assistant to enable a caller to find out the IP address of the called party’s telephone, so they can send packets with digitized speech to that person’s phone.

Trunking is a term that has been generally used in the telecom business in the past to mean communication between telephone switches. Trunks connect CO switches, toll centers and other switches in the PSTN.

PBX trunks connect an organization’s private switch to a CO switch.

SIP Trunking is a term invented by the marketing department to mean to mean “native communication of SIP call setup messages and Voice over IP traffic between an organization’s locations, with a Service Level Agreement and transmission characteristics sufficient to guarantee the sound quality.” And a gateway service thrown in.

Native means carrying the IP packets without converting them to an old-fashioned telephone call. The IP packets in question are at first carrying SIP call setup messages, then once the call is set up, the IP packets each contain typically 20 ms of digitized speech.

SIP Trunking replaces the previous architecture of PBX trunks.

It would be more accurate to refer to this new service as “SIP and Voice over IP Trunking” – but “SIP Trunking” rolls off the tongue better…

To learn more, attend BOOT CAMP March 27-31, or just the last two days of BOOT CAMP, which are Course 130 Understanding Voice over IP March 30-31.

“About Teracom” page update

The “About Teracom” page has been updated. Since it is a bit longer than before, we’ll post the new page here, then sections as individual posts for easy reference. Cheers!

About Teracom Training Institute

At Teracom, we concentrate on one thing: telecommunications training for non-engineers. This way, we can bring you the best!

Our Specialty

Our specialty is explaining telecom technologies to non-engineers who need a comprehensive update and overview, as well as for newcomers who need to get up to speed quickly.

Since 1992, we’ve spent thousands of hours developing and refining extremely valuable telecommunications training, Voice over IP (VoIP) and SIP training, and IP telecom training courses containing knowledge that spans years of university education, hands-on engineering, consulting and interaction with the biggest companies in the business.

We’ve organized and distilled this knowledge into proven training courses that consistently draws rave reviews from people like you – needing to build a solid base of knowledge, understand the jargon and buzzwords, fill in the gaps and understand mainstream technologies and trends… and how it all fits together.

We’ll start at the beginning, cut through the jargon, bust the buzzwords, sort out technologies and provide an understanding of mainstream trends and practical cost-effective solutions… without bogging down on technical details. more

Best-of-Breed Quality – GSA Contract

Since the beginning, our objective has been to be “best of breed”, providing the best quality training of this type available… at a lower price point than competitors.

Our success in the drive for quality is proven by follow-on business: often, one person from a company attends a seminar, then others from the same company attend subsequent sessions. In a number of cases, one person has attended a public seminar, then their company has had us in for private onsite training of dozens or hundreds more of their personnel.

We are proud to have been awarded a United States Federal Supply Schedule GSA Contract number GS-02F-0053X, which means pre-approved quality and pricing. Applying for this US Government supply contract and being evaluated for acceptance by the GSA was a two-year-long process with a 200-page offer, which included quality rating where we scored 97%!

Who Should Attend

Teracom’s training is geared towards non-engineers who work for:

• Telecom network and service providers including telephone companies, fiber backbone companies, broadband (cable) companies, mobile companies, CLECs and aggregators and resellers,

• Telecom equipment manufacturers including manufacturers of CO equipment, switches and routers, fiber and wireless transmission systems, handsets and last-mile technologies,

• Organizations that buy telecom equipment and services, including banks, power companies, government and military… including the telecom department of Wells Fargo, Entergy, the Justice Department, the US Marines, Oneida Tableware, the SF Giants and Portland Trailblazers amongst many, many others.

… and individuals who would like to improve their skills for this kind of job.

“Non-engineering personnel” means professional personnel:

• whose primary functions include accounting, tax, finance, business development, planning, marketing, sales, operations, telecom help-desk support, telecom service ordering and auditing, and software development,

• who are required to deal with telecommunications network technologies in their job,

• who have not had formal training on the telecom network and its related technical jargon, acronyms, abbreviations and technologies.

• who experiences frustration at not understanding all the technical terms and how everything fits together, has learned bits and pieces on the job, and is at risk of being inefficient or even making errors in their job because of it.

“Training for non-engineers” means that the training is at the concept level, understanding the key ideas and mainstream practices, and don’t get into detailed design discussions. For example, we discuss the ideas behind SIP, what it is and it works, but don’t analyze SIP message packets.

An exception to the “non-engineers” audience is engineers who are not telecom engineers. We have trained many software engineers and developers, who are tasked with developing provisioning, operations or billing systems for telecom services – but who have little or no knowledge of the “network”, and will benefit from understanding the application for the software they are developing. We also see mechanical, chemical and civil engineers who have ended up working for a telecom company and need to fill in gaps.

Our Instructors

Teracom’s instructors are professionals with broad and deep knowledge of telecommunications, data communications and networking technologies and trends and many years’ experience teaching seminars.

Unlike some you will encounter elsewhere, Teracom instructors all have Engineering or equivalent university degrees and hands-on experience working with the technologies they’re teaching.

All of our instructors share another common trait: the ability to cut through the jargon and buzzwords to explain the key concepts and mainstream solutions in plain English, without bogging down on jargon… knowledge you can’t get by reading trade magazines or talking to vendors.

Types of Training Available

You can benefit from this career- and productivity-enhancing telecommunications training through the delivery mechanism that suits you best:

• attending a public seminar,

• bringing our instructor to your company for private onsite team training,

• taking online courses, or registering for a TCO Certification Package, which is online courses from Teracom coupled with certification from the Telecommunications Certification Organization,

• ordering our DVD-video courses,

• using our printed textbooks and eBooks for self-study,

… or combinations thereof!

Instructor-led training is the best you can get, as it allows you to focus, to interact and ask questions. Online courses are available anytime, anywhere, and the certification is concrete proof of knowledge acquisition. DVD-video courses are useful for group training. Textbooks can be used on their own, and many people find the textbooks an invaluable companion to instructor-led, online or DVD courses.

Online courses and certification are included as a free bonus with instructor-led training and DVD-video course packages.

Accreditation

Teracom Training Institute has been accredited by the Telecommunications Certification Organization (TCO) as a TCO-Certified Training Partner, authorized to develop approved courses meeting the TCO curriculum, administer exams for and award TCO Certification to successful candidates.

How We Keep Our Training Up to Date

The short answer: by constantly teaching public and private seminars.

The world of telecommunications has two aspects: the fundamentals, which change slowly, and the technologies, which change at a more rapid pace.

The content, the selection of topics, their order, the timing and pacing of our training courses has been tuned and refined over the years, based on our knowledge of the industry, experience working in the telecom business, and feedback from customers.

The content is kept up to date based on questions and feedback from seminar participants, and based on the set of topics requested for private onsite courses.

We count all of the biggest telephone companies in North America amongst our customers, and the topics they request for training each year are a driver of course updates.

Our flagship instructor-led course, which we think of as “core training”, i.e. the knowledge set needed by anyone serious in the telecom business, is updated approximately twice a year.

This helps ensure that our other training products: online courses, DVD-video courses and textbooks, which are for the most part derived from the instructor-led course, also stay up to date.