The same mathematical principles that enable your local telephone company to have adequate capacity available for all subscribers, no matter when they decide to call, are the ones employed to ensure that any call to an Information Provider’s (IP’s) 800 or 900 program is connected properly. Since not all subscribers actually do call at once, the network is sized according to the maximum number of individuals likely to call, plus an additional amount for a safety factor. That means that the network must have more voice ports and equivalent telephone lines assigned than the expected number of calls from the largest response situation – a television commercial or similar announcement directed to a sizeable audience.
What enables the network to economically sustain this considerable size, which is called into service only infrequently, is the principle of dynamic allocation. When calls are routed from the carrier network to our own, the carrier sends a short message before the opening of the voice path that identifies, among other things, the number dialed by the customer. This signalling, called the Dialed Number Identification System or DNIS is what allows our switches and IVR resources to connect the call to exactly the information sought, no matter how many demands are made for that same information. Because each call is preceded by the DNIS identifier for the information sought, the switch and IVR systems respond by delivering just that destination or information associated with only that DNIS. As a consequence, as many incoming calls as are prefaced with your DNIS identifier for your number get routed or answered according to those precise specifications for that number. With a system sized to the largest likely calling response and a sharing of resources across programs, the resultant combination of effectiveness and efficiency is sized to handle 95% of the situations normally presented.
But what about the other 5% ? Since it makes no economic sense to build an overly huge network, waiting for the possibility of a huge application, facilities are linked at the network level to expand capacity in those unusual situations where it may be required. An example of allocating facilities at the network level is contained in the EXPERIENCE section. Back up and click through to learn more about such an example.