The telephony infrastructure is not limited in the number of total ports it can support and can be deployed via a modular system that allows incremental capacity to be added quickly and easily, often in as little as a week. Ports are shared among all applications and not dedicated to specific applications. Calls are answered by any available port, and then connected with the appropriate application. This pooling of ports provides two main advantages. First, all applications benefit when network capacity is increased.
Every new port allows the network to answer an additional call for any application.
It also increases network robustness by increasing the opportunities for load balancing and fail over across network components. Second, costs are lower for customers since per-port overhead costs are shared by all applications. Port pooling also allows Tellme to better handle large spikes in call traffic. If an application receives an unexpected spike in call traffic, Tellme will continue to accept calls for it until all available ports are exhausted. This is superior to a dedicated-port model, where the number of ports allocated to an application limits simultaneous call capacity.