How do your phone lines cope with so many calls?

Question: How do your phone lines cope with so many calls?
- Keywords:
  call,
  phone,
  telephone
Asked by harry4 to Cathy, Jaz, Mark, Roma, Rory on 18 Jun 2014.
- Mark Greaves answered on 18 Jun 2014:
  
  Hi Harry,
  
  I’ll admit that I’m no expert in phone lines. I think at my place of work we have very large switchboards and many phone lines.
  
  We not only have to let our 7 million customers phone us but also allow our 5,000 staff to be in contact with each other and our supplies.
  
  Mark
- Rory Hadden answered on 18 Jun 2014:
  
  Thats a great question. I don’t know for sure but I do know that in the olden days each house was connected by one cable to an exchange so there are miles and miles of cables under streets and on telegraph poles. These carried electrical signals and if they were damaged and the wires touched you could hear other people’s phone calls. It always sounded weird when that happened cos the other people sounded like ghosts!
  
  These days we use fibre optic cables to transmit lots of calls in the same ‘cable’ (its actually made of really thin glass). By turning your voice into a digital signal, a laser fires pulses of light down the fire optic cable. These are received at the other end abad converted to sound again. The laser can fire pulses very quickly (quicker than you can talk) so they are able to transmit many phone calls (and intent and tv data) down one cable at the same time.
  
  It’s interesting that these days people use land lines less and less so maybe one day we won’t have a cabled phone in the house and everyone will use mobiles. What do you think about that?
  
  Rory
- Roma Agrawal answered on 19 Jun 2014:
  
  Hi Harry,
  
  That’s a great question, it used to be the case that the only way to communicate quickly was via the telephone, as letters used to take at least a day to be delivered. Now with the advent of emails the volume of phone calls that a company like the one I work for would receive is much less. We still do receive calls but this is only usually to discuss a matter that can only be solved via a direct conversation. This is not true of all professions, companies like British Gas that deal with millions of customers, will still receive a huge amount of phone calls as usually the issues that their customers have can only be solved over the phone. However, even companies like these are seeking to reduce the number of calls they receive by encouraging customers to go online first to try and solve the problem before making a call. So for certain companies like mine the number of calls we receive is not totally overwhelming and can be managed by a handful of people.
  
  Roma
- Jaz Rabadia answered on 19 Jun 2014:
  
  Fibre optic cables have helped us a great deal. now we can transmit data super quick – as fast as the speed of light!
- Cathy Fraser answered on 19 Jun 2014:
  
  Wow – some great answers here engineers!
  
  Harry – I’m like the others, most of my communications are face to face and I do speak to people on the phone – but if I’m trying to communicate a lot of information – I find an email works well!

Question: How do your phone lines cope with so many calls?

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