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Minutes and Lines Calculator
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Here is a
brief introduction to the calculator. For more detailed information, press the Help
button which opens a new browser window on your desktop.
- You can use this calculator to work out how many voice paths you need to provide through
a network if you know the number of minutes of calls which the two voice switches
interconnected by that network will generate. Designers of network convergence solutions
need to ensure that sufficient bandwidth is available through a network to transport
enough voice paths to carry the voice traffic during its busiest hour.
- As an example, if you wanted to know how many voice paths would need to be provided for
a trunk group which was offered 10000 minutes of calls a day:
- Click on the Unknown radio button in the Voice paths section to
indicate that it is the number of voice paths that you wish to calculate.
- Enter 10000 in the Minutes per day edit box.
- Press the Calc. button.
- The answer is displayed in the Voice paths edit box (40).
- Reverse calculations are also possible allowing you to calculate the minutes of calls
which can be carried by a trunk group of a particular size. To carry out such a
calculation, click on the Unknown radio button in the Minutes per day
section, enter the number of lines in the Lines required edit box and press the Calc.
button. The answer will be shown in the Minutes per day edit box.
- This calculator uses the Erlang B traffic model which is discussed in detail in the help
system. You have the opportunity to specify two additional parameters relating to this
traffic model and to the traffic pattern:
- The busy hour factor is the percentage of daily minutes which are offered during the
busiest hour of the day. 17% (the default) is a reasonable figure for a business which
operates an 8 hour working day, but a higher figure could be entered if the business in
question operates a shorter working day, or if frequent calls are being made to a
different time zone.
- Blocking target is the ratio of calls which will be blocked because no lines are
available. 0.010 (the default) means that 1% of calls would be lost. This is a normal
figure for traffic engineering, but other figures can be entered into this edit box.
- Please note that in order to make a safe judgement of the number of lines required,
traffic figures over a significant time period are required. One day's traffic figures are
not enough.
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| The calculator on this page is modelled on the Call Minutes Calculator
included with the Westbay Traffic Calculators for Windows 95/98/NT. The calculator
works up to 30,000,000 million minutes per day and has the ability to display and
print the results of any calculations you have made during the previous week. 
Westbay Traffic Calculator main window
Customers also benefit from an Erlang B Calculator, an Extended Erlang B
Calculator and an Erlang C Calculator for analysing call centres.
You will also receive a free copy of Erlang for Excel. This is a Add-In for Microsoft Excel
version 97 or higher which allows Erlang B functions to be included in your own
spreadsheets.
Westbay Traffic Calculators does not support Voice over
IP. For VoIP calculations, please see our VoIP Select Windows calculator.
These calculators are available for 139 US
Dollars. If you pay using VISA, MasterCard, American Express or Discovery, you can
have this software working on your PC in five minutes!
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| Westplan is a revolutionary software package which simplifies the
complicated design process involved in creating effective voice networks that are based on
either traditional circuit switching or Voice over IP. All calculations are based on an
inter-nodal traffic model which you can specify yourself, or allow Westplan to estimate. 
Westplan main window, with a network drawing in view
By allowing you to try different network topologies, Westplan quickly helps you to make
informed judgements on the suitability of particular voice networking strategies to your
company. You will be in a stronger position to understand your voice network costs and
therefore to control your network resources.
Westplan supports these features:
- Point and click network diagrams
- Voice over IP bandwidth calculations
- Layer 2 support for PPP, Frame Relay, Ethernet, ATM and HDLC.
- Analogue, T1 and E1 transmission facilities
- User-definable routing rules
- RTP compression for VoIP
- Full justification reports for each analysis
- Clear printed reports
- Context sensitive help
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