TREST CONSULTING SERVICES AND PROJECTS

Mike Trest, Principal Consultant
Judy Trest, Web/Media Consultant
Charlotte, North Carolina USA  
Office : +1 704 543 4723  

Mike and Judy Trest ( along with a group of multi-talented professionals ) provide support to clients on a project basis. Projects typically involve development of commercial communications products, IP and Voice network engineering, or WEB / Database / application design and development.

SOME TREST CONSULTING PROJECTS:

ROBO DIALING (Political) : The heated 2012 political campaigns presented a URGENT FAST-START demand late one Friday night. One of the specialized suppliers that exclusively provides call support for 501c3 (Charitable) and 501c4 (Political) calls had lost their TDM carrier. Several referrals not withstanding, the call for help came to Trest Consulting to bring up 10,000 voip lines ASAP. A few phone calls and we brough up 2,500 lines within an hour. By Monday, we had turned up 5,000 lines with East Coast and West Coast VoIP gateways. Within a week we had turned up 10.000 lines with 9 carriers. We now have an additional 15,000 lines available for growth with 11 Carriers with Least Cost Routing and Route-Advance capabilities.

While Outbound Calling with Interactive Voice Response, has become more common, the regulations are quite stringent. There are major penalties for violations of the Do Not Call list. The largest carriers are also demanding Local Number Portability routing and live Caller ID Numbers (ANIs). Furthermore, the ANSs used must always be answered (using auto attendant or live person) by the actual entity paying for the content of the call. Fortunately, the client was fully certified with legally acceptable proof that they were in full compliance with the regulations for both USA and Canada.

Because of our extensive contacts with US and International carriers, and with at least 10+ years of automated calling applications, we were able to assemble VoIP trunking into multiple Session Border Controllers (and Proxies). Today, eleven carriers, each of which allow very high volumes of short duration calls are available to the client. As an added bonus, the client is frequently seeing over 40% answered calls which makes it one of the highest in the ROBO DIAL industry.

On the technology side, this rapid deployment included: approximately 70+ Asterisks, 3 OpenSips (proxies), 4 SBCs, 2 softswitches, enough Cisco and ACME packet to do TDM/VoIP conversion for 25+ DS3 connection with the carriers. All of this gear was re-deployed from the on-hand inventories of the 11 carriers involved in the project.

Emergency Services : Continuing into 2011-2012, Judy and Mike support systems to U.S. Navy and other agencies that provide critical emergency response support. The application combines SMS/Text Messages, Call-Out Voice Announcements, Outbound Calling with Interactive Voice Response, as well as Toll-Free inbound calling. Currently, four such systems provide 24*7*365 emergency notification and MUSTER applications to a population of over 10,000 responders. Operating globally, the MUSTER application can provide proactive telephone alerts to any or all segments of this population. Likewise, the responders use Toll-Free / Direct Dial call to report their current status. The telephone calls are integrated with IT / WEB applications that track availablity and current status of those with first-responder responsibilities. This system is available to local and state governmental agencies, schools and universities and greatly reduced pricing. It can be integrated with existing WEB based services in co-operation with client's IT developers (or independent contractors).

On Line Transaction Processing : Mike re-designed a ultra-high volume OLTP database farm that supports 600 Million DB transaction a day using clusters of low-cost MySQL machines. These databases are the back-end support to tens-of-thousands of web transactions per-second from Internet applications. The on-line revenue from these Linux and Windows applications require absolute 24*7 availability as well as data consistency throughout the entire farm of WEB and DataBase servers. Mike provided key design, programming and integration support to achieve these goals.

Voice Bridge : A system design and deployment project providing a 6,000 port voice bridge to support a Mobile application for SPRINT/NEXTEL. This platform is used to deliver NASCAR audio programming from inside the race cars to mobile subscribers. A similar project will support 100,000 ports for delivery of interactive entertainment media to mobile subscribers.

Click Calling, Conference Bridge and other Enhanced Services telephony application continues to be in high demand with several projects ongoing. In addition to new web sites activities, Judy and I are continuing to support a security data collection application with high volume calling with touch tone data capture.

Satellite Communications : This included space segment links between North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, South America for telephony and internet projects. One special destination project designed and supported satellite and ground station WI-FI wireless network to support the Base Camp for climbers on Mount Everest in the Kingdom of Nepal! Trest Consulting combined efforts of many individual and corporate contributions, has evolved to provide Internet connectivity to several remote villages for distance-learning and other direct educational benefits to the Sherpa community in the region.

VoIP : Dozens of our projects support VoIP communications networks deploying both TDM and VoIP technologies with an AIN / SS7 networks.   These VoIP network projects have now transitioned into viable commercial entities operating in United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Italy, Japan, and Hong Kong. Collectively, these networks carry billions of mllions of minutes per month of commercial voice traffic.

The VoIP projects started because of our years of hands-on experience with Cisco, Quintum, NexTone, Asterisk and many other VoIP controllers. Collectively, these projects have deployed over 900 VoIP gateways. All of which came from an initial project to help a friend understand how to use the new VoIP technology in their telephony business model.

Medical & Telemetry Device : In another project Mike helped a medical appliance firm bring a mobile heart monitoring system to market. The project required integration of an embedded RTOS, a 900Mhz transceiver running proprietary sensor link protocols, an AMPS/CDMA cell phone chip set, and a GPS receiver chipset. All of this was squeezed into a package not much larger than a Palm size PDA.

The approach used was to provide hands-on support to port the RTOS to the new hardware, to write the device drivers, and to provide integration support for the hardware engineers and the application software developers. Having a solid background in telemetry, link protocls, TCP/IP protocols and Cellular networks was very useful.

Call Centers : Another project required both Judy and Mike to stabilize a large Call Center that was growing at explosive rates. When invited to "take a look our situation" the company was hiring 40 new employees every 3 weeks. New desks, computers, phones were going on a daily basis! When fully functional the 400 seat facility handeled 20,000 calls per shift, two shifts a day, 7 days a week. This project required dealing with 30+ T1 inbound voice trunks going to multiple CTI and IVR servers, a cluster of SQL database servers, and multiple Internet links supporting public WEB server access as well as SSL / VPN links going to remote retail store-fronts.

We used a tag-team approach to provide a rapid assessment and strategic planning document for the engagement. From there, we launched into a 3 month project during which the business multiplied the daily sales rate by a factor of 4. We organized and participated in hands-on training for the client's growing IT staff. We re-designed the existing physical network facilities to more effectively deal with the infrastructure growth, stabilized power distribution and UPS backup power, re-design the LAN into multiple IP zones where the key services had appearances on each subnet. We assisted the IT staff in restructuring their SQL application. Finally, we designed and, with the client's IT staff, brought up a secure SSL / VPN thin-client application for the remote store front locations. This thin-client application was fully integrated via redundant SSL servers for the front-end and multiple database servers on the back end.

Currently we restrict our consulting and investment activities to projects of interest, theatre and service organizations. While our family is our highest priority, we are constantly amazed at the number of projects that we are able to advise, support or invest our energy and/or resources.

SOME ACCOMPLISHMENTS:
2011-present   Trest Consulting, KWalitytel, IGCacquisitions, 2020Voice, various board meetings and some private consulting projects.

2008-2011 DataConversions, Inc. As DBA . . . in advance of retirement (and to reduce corporate responsibilities) Mike supported a large OLTP database farm here in Charlotte, NC.

2007-2008 Mike helped start IGC Acquisitions, Inc. (http://www.igcacquisitions.com) as CTO. He was responsible for technical design, development and deployment of new applications and networks. He is also manages interconnect relationships for telephony carriers and IP networks and is IGC's official point of contact for FCC and other regulatory matters.

In 2004, Mike was appointed to Board of advisors to Scientigo, Inc. He later served as CTO before severing the relationship.

In 2002, Mike was founder and CTO of Konfer Technologies a VoIP carrier with both U.S. domestic and Internation telephone traffic.

In 1999, Mike was a Sr. Advisory Consultant with Sun Technology Solutions. a financial and technology advisory firm serving communications technology companies. With specializations in satellite, telephony, and Internet convergence technologies, Mike advised SUN clients on technology and product development, corporate sales, mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures and strategic investments.

In 1997-1999, Mike And Judy, with Japanese friends and investors, started a Nippon ATMnet in Yokohama Japan Nippon ATMnet provided consulting service to our principal partner (Hitachi) and other Japan based companies. We worked on business strategies for communications network architecture, product positioning, and on-line business strategies.

In 1995, Mike was CTO and a founder of ATMnet in San Diego, California one of the first commercial providers of fiber service for Internet clients. In addition to purely commercial customers, ATMnet incubated many regional ISP providers in Southern California, the largest Self-hosting WEB site provider, and many large WEB farm / E-Commerce sites. Mike was responsible for infrastructure planning, network deployment strategies, and incorporating new communications technologies. 1990-present Trest Consulting started as a means to explore private projects for Judy and some friends in the technical community. This included Unix internals, device drivers, and applications. The earlies Linux versions soon became a "fixation" that has found a place in various projects since it's earliest availability.

Mike also tracked standards of ATM FORUM   now   BROADBAND FORUM and the Internet Engineering Task Force IETF . Mike was also an invited participant in the Clinton-Gore Next Generation Internet workshop ( See publication.)     Mike has spoken at industry seminars and before telco trade associations like United States Telephone Association ( USTA - - Now USTELECOM ) and Society Of Telecom Consultants ( STC ). Mike also presented the case for the ISP industry and the Commercial Internet Exchange ( CIX - - Now US ISPA ) membership before the Federal Communications Commission ( FCC ) and to the White House National Economic Council (the Clinton-Gore administrations).

From 1980 ~ 1995, Mike held positions as Chief Scientist or Lead Engineer with Systems Development Corporation (now Unisys), Purvis Systems, and Visicom Laboratories (now Titan) on projects for U.S. Navy and numerous government agencies.

Since the Judy and Mike have both held clearances to Top Secret levels including SBI / COMSEC and other specials.

On a personal note, you are welcome to Travel With Mike & Judy To Interesting Places

Last updated March 2008