Turret Phones

Great question - allow me to troll for attention. Bill, I assume you will promptly contribute. Help us out with a back to reality talk.

Scenario:

Brokerage. 2 seats on the NYSE floor, HQ located in a town known for breweries. 80 branches, locations in US and UK. Tradenet MX 7 years old. Number of Traders - about 30 on a institutional desk doing the big blocks with other major firms or fund companies. For Nasdaq/OTC, there are say 15 folks with far less need to juggle phone lines. Then the remiaining IPC subscribers are 45 sales or "calm" type people that either drum up buisiness or otherwise work with the trader but don't use ARDs or perform the trades.

Prior to poster EC and my arrival at the Firm, they switched from really wide Nortel phones to the IPC system. Pervious TCom Wiz was unfamiliar with Meridian for the most part.

The reasons used to justify going Turret should not have included "mission critical" or "up-time", since the system is fed off the Meridian for so many critical lines. Certainly number of lines per instrument is a reason..

Now... short of those possible reasons, how have groups our size, in your experience, justified Turrets vs the PBX phone. We ain't gonna pull it out just to simplify our jobs, but in the near future, we will have to replace it with something.

Dang, you outposted me!!!

The biggest disadvantages to using "regular" digital display sets is that you severely limit yourself in the number of available speed dial buttons and there is no provision for ARD broker lines and you would need external broker boxes + microphones (sometimes called hoot-n-holler, junkyard, or shout-down lines), one each for as many ARDs as each trader may have. Many traders also prefer to have two handsets and use both simultaneously with push-to-mute buttons (seller on one handset, buyer on the other) and noice-cancelling mouthpieces. Without a Turret some of that functionality would require two separate phones. A trade floor with ordinary phones is not a trade floor. They will also want the ability to punch up TV audio for any of the several news channels being monitored. Trust me, your traders will demand turrets and nothing less will suffice.

He who hesitates is lost :-))

We tried the "really wide" phones, MITEL SS4150 + 48 button adjunct (Programmable Key Module) alongside, damn thing looked like a church organ, and I ordinarily like Mitel phones. Those were a nightmare. Great for a dept. receptionist, but lousy for a trader. Thank goodness common sense prevailed. Given enough gears you can pull a freight train with a washing machine motor, but your clients will bitch about performance.

The Etrali Mach-2 turrets run on 2048k bps E1 which believe it or not runs just fine across Cat3 - yes, 3, up to 300 cable ft anyway. No, I sure don't recommend cat3, but if overhauling your backbone cabling is a line item, you may be able to defer it till later. Local power at the turret also will save a bundle.