GTT's Good News: 'Humans Replacing Computers'

Every once in a while along comes a company news headline that demands to be included in First Coffee. Today we saw another one: "Humans Replacing Computers."

Steve Levenson, founder of Global Telecom Testing, says that the idea for the company came when he heard that a global teleconferencing company was losing clients because the international numbers assigned to its customers were flawed.

He contends that most telecom companies rely on the local telephone companies in cities abroad to confirm numbers are operational, which is, he says, a bad idea: "More often than not, even though the overseas' local telephone company confirms a number is operational, the number doesn't work."

"GTT was founded specifically to address the lack of worldwide live in-country telephone number testing on behalf of telecom companies, before they release international numbers to their clients," Levenson said. "Only humans -- not computers -- can perform these tests by placing live, in-country,outbound originating calls to and from the exact numbers that the telco's clients will be calling."

On the Web site Levenson says if your business relies on international conferencing in order to conduct day-to-day operations, "you know how unreliable international conferencing can be."

The company's employees, located in 80 countries, test numbers before they are released to clients "to ensure they are operational," Levenson says, adding that they also "listen to the message participants will hear, note if instructions are in the appropriate language, and test the access codes and the quality of the audio."

What usually happens, Levenson says, is that if a telecom client needs international numbers in Singapore, a computer at a U.S. telecom company office tests the numbers from a switch in the U.S. to a switch somewhere close to Singapore. Then "if the switch-to-switch trial works, the numbers are released to the client. However, this rudimentary testing is inaccurate and not indicative of working numbers in Singapore."

The only way to 100 percent verify that international telephone numbers are functioning in any city is to perform live, in-country tests in those cities and locations, Levenson says.

Prospective customers get a free trial with live testing in two or three countries. "We're so confident in our services that we offer potential clients a two-day trial test to demonstrate the effectiveness of our comprehensive process."