Overview

Provisioning is the specification, ordering and installation of trunks, lines and services into and out of your telephone system so that you can make and receive calls to other people and companies.

How To Determine How Many Phone Lines You Need

Determining the number and type of outside lines coming into your telephone system is an inexact science. Overkill is marginally better than not enough lines-too few lines and your incoming callers will get busy signals and your employees won t be able to get an outside line. Then again, you don t want so many trunks that you re paying for capacity being unused.

The easiest way to estimate the number of trunks you need for your phone system is based on the number of people using your system. As the number of people on the system increases, the proportion changes. Efficiency of use increases as the number of trunks increases. For a 50 person office, 30 trunks is plenty. If you have 100 people and average telephone use, (no high-traffic call centers), 25 combination (also called bothway trunks; they handle either incoming or outgoing calls) trunks will probably be more than enough. One hundred trunks will be too many for 400 people.

As the number of users decreases, you will need more trunks as a percentage of users. The smallest systems might use one trunk per person.

If you are using DID trunks, which are incoming only, with combo trunks for outgoing, you will need more trunks altogether because unused...