A TURRET is one of the most God-Forsaken telephone contrivences ever devised by a sick, sick mind.
Fundamentally a TURRET is a trader/brokerage phone capable of concurrently handling multiple simultaneous calls with two handsets, an external goosneck microphone, a speaker and multiple auto-answer ARD lines, with everybody talking at once. There's a virtul sea of multi-color, self-labeling speedcall buttons and a touch screen offering 36 or more single button speedcalls per page and with 8 to 10 (or more) pages. With a turret phone you can work any desk on the floor from any desk on the floor, or work all desks from 1 desk.
When you see news coverage of brokerage houses or stock trading floors, the weird-looking phone in front of the trader is a TURRET. The concept is the trader, with two handsets, can have a supplier on one line and a customer on the other and by using push-to-talk (or optionally push-to-mute) buttons can literally be in the middle of the call negotiating a profit for himself by buying as cheaply as he can from the supplier and selling as high as he can to the customer, all at the same time. One caveat.... by actual system design no two calls can be joined together into a conference. You can make conference calls, but the user has to originate to all parties. (The Mitel add-held feature breaks this fundamental rule)
In most basic terms the Mitel 5560 IPT is a dumbded-down TURRET with only a tiny number of the features of a real brokerage house telephone, but someone thought there was a market for it so the 5560 is what it is. Most real trading floors would have no use for a 5560 because it cannot begin to do what an honest-to-God Turret can do. A couple big names in Turret phones today is IPC (biggest) and Etrali/Orange (Div. of France Telecom). There are some others, but those are the two I'm familiar with. During the height of the Enron scandal we had a 300-seat trading floor with an Etrali turret system operating as a key system slaved off of an SX2K using E1 Etsi Q.sig trunking. I still have 6 of the original 300 still in service and it's those 6 I have to find a suitable way to replace W/Mitel IP phones without compromising features, or at least being able to come up with a workaround.
Most IPC systems are slaved off Nortel systems w/line-side T1 trunking. Nortel professes to offer Q.sig but.....
The key here is the users are unaccustomed to having to "look up" anything or have to spell anything from a keyboard. They want to be able to look *AT* a static or scrolling display and hit a button and have the phone place the call. The "People" function seems to come closest to that requirement.
Putting in speedcalls and "naming" them in the teldir requires a lookup function. BZZZZT no look up.. Look **AT** and choose. That's not to say we wont end up having to go that route, but right now the people function looks most attractive, short of keeping the existing relic in service.
