CallerID Blocking?

[fimchick]

Howdy,

We have a hosted VOIP solution and we recently asked them to enable CallerID Blocking for one of our sales guys.

They said it's now enabled and whenever that person wants to block ther ID to prefix the number with a specific code.

What I am curious to know is why they said that "It may take up to a week for the change to propagate nation-wide"? I'm confused as to what exactly is propagating?

Thanks1

 

[Sympology]

They probebrly use softswitches and maybe the have to synch them all. VoIP is portable, so you may be in Location A connecting to Server A, but you then could move to Location B and connect to server B.

Most people spend their time on the "urgent" rather than on the "important."

 

[donb01]

Propagate = Spread

Similar to what the guy above said, let's assume your office is in LA or someplace and your service is hosted by this company that is kind of like the internet - they have, say, 50 systems scattered around the US/world that process calls for them.

So you say you want to turn on caller-id. That change gets sent to the LA system, which now knows you want to have caller-id. Now someone calls your number in chicago or you call someone in chicago, and there is a different box that either accepts the call from the chicago person and sends it to LA, or receives the call from the person in LA to send to the person in chicago. THAT box doesn't know yet that you asked for caller-id in LA so you do not get or give the information.

The box in LA needs to send out messages to all the other boxes out there telling them to make the change. This usually happens by LA sending a notice to Seattle and Phoenix about the change, and then those boxes send a message to more boxes, and so on. It takes a while for these messages to spread to all the other boxes so they all know. The process of these messages spreading across the network to all the boxes is called Propagation - kind of like whispering a rumor to someone in a crowd. Sooner or later that rumor will spread through the whole crowd, and until then some people know about it and some don't.

I tried to make that as non-techie as possible... The techie people are probably all yakking in their garbage cans right now... P

 

[fimchick]

I'm a bit surprised that it would take so long -- it's only replicating a tiny piece of data, unless they only do replication once a week, which would also be extremely odd (how long could it possibly take to replicate the delta?).

Thanks guys, that explains it though

 

[dulfo666]

It ma only be a small amount of data for your change, but you are not the only customer. Chnages need to be prepared planned and rolled out in a controlled fashion.