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FOUR-FOUR-THREE-TWELVE-HUNDRED

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Cap'n Preshoot
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« Reply #15 on: September 19, 2009, 04:35:02 pm »

I did check to see what the "buy in" would cost and got the following information....

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The one time equipment cost is $5,300.00.  The equipment is specifically designed for this type of application.  It's solid-state NOT pc-based and does not utilize unreliable information from the internet.  The time announcement is via a satellite link with the U.S. Naval Observatory.  There is an onboard clock, too, that serves as a back-up.  The temperature announcement originates from an outside temperature sensor and updates each minute.

The only on-going costs are;

    1.    Whatever your local phone company charges for 8 telephone lines.
   
    2.    $95.00 per month paid to us for weather forecast and other support services.

As for location of the equipment, that's determined by the phone company's service area for the primary telephone number.  From the standpoint of physical requirements, the unit itself is 19 inches wide, 6 high and 15 deep.  It can be mounted in an equipment rack or placed on a shelf in a closet.  The temperature sensor and the GPS time receiver are mounted outside the building within 100' of the unit.



8 telephone lines means 8 "business" lines not residential, so including the $95 you're looking at monthly recurring costs of $4~500 bucks plus a $5,300 hardware investment plus phone line service order charges & installation.  A fractional T1/PRI from the telco would be a better way to go or cheaper yet, use dynamic SIP trunks from one of the many telco competitors and only pay for the bandwidth you use.

As for a "location"....... port the number over to Vonage (or similar) and the location could be anywhere with internet access. 217-443-1200 doesn't "have to be" in Danville. In this day and age it could just as easily be anywhere.

The thing could certainly be PC-based and written in Quick Basic and linked to an NTP time source (with a backup internal clock) & the local forecast captured off the local NOAA weather station (which is what it sounds like is happening anyway). This is not rocket science and the device (server) is not the space shuttle.  It could just as easily be written as an application residing on a commercial voice mail system like an auto-attendant application.

The "owner" of the phone number can keep the number as long as they want to keep paying for it, which it sounds like they don't.

The "claimed" call traffic level (70,000+ calls a month) is likely, as I said before, many-many repeat callers, meaning that your audience size is a fraction of the total call volume.  

I'll bet if "Lester the Tester" (Les Simpson/Danville Redipage) was still around that he'd snap it up in a heartbeat!

Here's an interesting (and locally popular) PC-SERVER-BASED system (written in Quick Basic) that gets a claimed 100,000 calls a month.  It's had a number of various sponsors over the years: 1-713-333-3456  (even works for Danville if you punch in your zip code)

« Last Edit: September 19, 2009, 04:48:10 pm by Cap'n Preshoot » Report Spam   Logged

The Pay-TV industry does not hold the patent on alienating customers, but COMCAST in particular has succeeded in making an art form of it.
Radardude
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« Reply #16 on: October 18, 2009, 08:08:40 am »

Looks like Cellular One has taken it over.
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