Huffman Trucking Telephony Network

An Analysis of Huffman Trucking Telephony System

Huffman Trucking, a national trucking company has logistical hubs located throughout the nation, in Los Angeles, California, St. Louis, Missouri and Byonne, New Jersey, with its central maintenance facility located in Cleveland, Ohio. Huffman employs 1,400 employees as drivers of its 800 road tractors.

Types of Systems

Currently Huffman trucking uses both an analog phone network and digital phone network, which is commonly known as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). Their analog network is located both at their California and New Jersey home offices, as well as in their New Jersey plant. The VoIP network is implemented within their California plant, Missouri plant, Ohio plant and both the Missouri and Ohio offices.

Physical Extent of Huffman Telephony Systems

Huffman's analog system is comprised of any basic telephone system that runs Plain Old Telephone Services (POTS) within a medium-sized to larger company. The service comes into the plant Private Branch Exchange (PBX), which "is a small telephone switch owned by a company or organization (www.tech-fax.com/phx.shtml)", and in this case Huffman Trucking. The PBX allows Huffman users to "share a certain number of outside lines for making telephone calls external to the PBX (www.webopdedia.com)". Without a PBX, Huffman Trucking would have to connect every telephone line within the organization to the equal amount of external phone lines. This cuts down on cost tremendously. The plant PBX is then connected, with the exception of the New Jersey plant, to another PBX somewhere within the office building or plant, and from there, individual phone lines are ran to their respective telephones throughout the office or plant. The New Jersey plant hits a patch panel and then spreads to its respective telephones from there.

Huffman's VoIP system is comprised of both an Avaya and Nortel digital phone systems respectively. The Avaya system is implemented at the Missouri and Ohio offices and the Nortel system is implemented