FOC, PRI, ICB and other alphabet soup

Keeping up with the acronyms that telecom companies use can be a nightmare.

You’re on your third call today with a carrier sales rep and there is a bowl of alphabet soup sized number of letters coming out of the other end of the phone.  In the telecom business, we call them “TLAs” (see what we did there) or three letter acronyms. 

One of the things we strive to do as your telecom and technology advisor is to avoid as many of these as we can.  However, the rest of the telecom world doesn’t operate that way.  This is by no means an exhaustive list- but I’ve included a few of the most common ones that we see below.  I’m not going into detail on any of these here, but if you’d like to learn more about any of them, don’t hesitate to contact us.  We will help you make sense of all of the letters.

  • DSL- Digital Subscriber Line DIA- Dedicated Internet Access
  • TEM- Telecom Expense Management
  • MTM- Machine-to-Machine
  • IoT- Internet of Things
  • MACD- Move, add, change or delete
  • DID- Direct Inward Dialing
  • ISP- Internet Service Provider
  • IVR- Interactive Voice Response
  • WAN- Wide Area Network
  • LAN- Local Area Network
  • PRI- Primary Rate Interface
  • SIP- Session Initiation Protocol
  • QoS- Quality of Service
  • VoIP- Voice over Internet Protocol
  • FOC- Firm Order Commitment

Again, these are just a sample of the many acronyms that live out there.  We help cut through the confusion and speak in plain English- so that you can understand exactly what you are getting.  Contact us today.

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