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Best Caller ID Hardware MadeA Competitive ComparisonOverviewThe Following Statements Can Only be Made by YES Telecom
Callerid.com claims:"ninety-five percent of the world wide market"
What unbiased method could be used to verify? How about website visitor volume?
Accurate? Yes, as a relative comparison.
Their overall ranking shows YES Telecom has 1,265% (4,819/381) more visitors to our website. YES has 42 DMOZ listings and they have none. The WhoIs Listing says we have 3,299 visitors a month but AwStats says 12,865 with 11,205 unique visitors and 213,833 hits.
July 2010 Update YES Telecom UP 46% Over Last Year
CallerID.com's WhoIs Listing, May 7, 2009 
July 2010 UpdateCallerID.com DOWN 212% 2010 Ranking Update
YES Telecom's Bell Labs Manufacturing ExperienceThe first product manufactured by YES Telecom (in 1987) was a remote reset module for Siemens Communications. A failure of this device could halt phone service to an entire medium sized city for a half hour or more. This device was connected to the main reset circuit of every large telephone system sold to the Bell Operating Companies. If this unit were to fail it would cause the phone system to re-boot making it non-functional during the 30 minute re-boot procedure.Due to the critical nature of this device it was required by Bellcore/Telcordia (the technical and quality regulatory body for all Bell Operating Companies) to be manufactured to their highest quality control standards. Bellcore also required the entire manufacturing process be inspected by on-site Bellcore Quality Control Inspectors. YES Telecom has always followed Bellcore design and manufacturing guidelines. The Identifier is manufactured to very stringent quality standards; our competitor violate many basic design and manufacturing quality control guidelines. See more on this below.
Our In-House Pick and Place Circuit Board Assembly RobotPrecision assembly of an Identifier circuit board by our pick and place robot.
The Identifier The Identifier PC Board with Precision Assembly and SMT Technology Manufactured to Stringent Bellcore/Telcordia Manufacturing Standards
Their's Below
Our High Impedance Input AdvantageOur unique non-passive high impedance (1,000,000,000,000 ohm) solid state phone line input. The LF347 op-amp preconditions the caller id and touch tone signals and filters out low and high frequency interference.Simple yet brilliant and elegant design.
 Identifier High Impedance Phone Line Interface Precision Component Placement by our pick and place robot
This is one of the major differences between the YES Identifier and its competitors. We add an active two stage amplifier (LF347) to pre-condition the Caller ID and Touch Tone signals rather than just a passive RC filter. This "snoop" circuit used in the Identifier to "listen" for the caller id data and touch tones was invented exclusively for YES Telecom by one of the best electrical engineers on the planet. It is an ingenious design, so good, we have never had a problem receiving the caller id signal. Even when other caller id devices do not work. Our Identifier has a free 2 year warranty and an extended warranty for only $10 per year for as many years as the customer wants. We are so confident of our quality, we back it up with an inexpensive extended warranty. Our warranty includes lightning protection and power surge. If damaged by lightning we will replace the unit free of charge. The competitor does not cover "Acts of God" We do, God is on our side. We offer a 45 day no questions asked full refund return period. The competitor uses out dated components and manufacturing techniques. The Identifier has more settings for on/off hook and DTMF pulse width timing, dialing, centrex, etc. See manual for complete features list: http://www.yes-tele.com/manual.html With both the heavy gauge aluminum enclosure and our 4 layer circuit board with one layer just for ground which will increase immunity to interference and reduce radiated interference We use a 4 layer circuit board even though it costs twice as much as a 2 layer PCB. Our competitor uses a 2 layer board with questionable circuit routing especially the ground signal paths. A four layer board improves both immunity to interference from other devices and reduces radiation of interference to other devices. The signal paths of a 2 layer board act as antenna that both transmits and receives interference. One layer of our 4 layer PC board is dedicated to the Ground signal and one lay dedicated to power distribution for greater circuit noise immunity. The competitor has neither. Their Ground signal is routed like a general circuit signal, a very poor PC Board design practice. The competitor uses a cheap plastic box and we use heavy gauge aluminum custom enclosure. This improves immunity to electrical and RF interference. Our unit will not induce interference with other devices. Our device cannot be interfered with by other device that radiate RF such as cell phones and RF transmitters. A plastic case and 2 layer PC Board will not pass the immunity test because enclosure plastic and cheap PCB cannot block external noise signals. Plastic and 2 layer PCB will not block radiated signals that will interfere with other electronic devices with low induced immunity.
 YES telecom's Serial Port with Hardware Handshaking The 16C450 UART chip shown here is the most expensive chip on the PCB. This gives us hardware handshaking that is very important in the diagnostic procedure and its FIFO buffer eliminates any possible loss of data. No other caller id unit has this feature. We have a diagnostic procedure to pinpoint the problem in the rare event it does not work. This is mainly attributed to the full hardware hand shaking signals. The competitor serial port only uses transmit and receive and no handshaking. Handshaking signals are very helpful when trouble shooting problems with a Windows COM port and eliminates loss of data. Our free software actually has some usable features. It is extremely reliable, a statement backed by many years in the field. We have NEVER had a problem with this software. It has worked on every computer with Windows 95 plus. One install on one workstation serves any number of workstations with just a shortcut on the other workstations. The competitor's unit outputs the data in a strange format not optimized for real-time events making application interface programming cumbersome. The Identifier output was architected with a goal for ease of programming. Computer Telephone Magazine reviewed both the competitor's box and our Identifier together and gave the Identifier their Editors Choice award over the competitor's box.
The CompetitorWarrantyHere are their warranty clauses:1. Any product purchased from CallerID.com after January 1, 2007 is covered under a 2 year warranty. Response 1. January 1, 2007 was over 2 years ago, why do they have this statement? Many years ago we both had a 1 year warranty. We (YES Telecom) increased ours to 2 years. They reacted with a 5 year warranty. We didn't care because you can extend the warranty by as many years as you want at $10 per year. So it would cost you $30 to get a 5 year warranty from us. For an additional $30 we still offered a better price. We actually discourage customers from buying an extended warranty because it's a waste of their money. They don't need it unless they are lightning prone. I guess they need this statement for the customers with the short lived 5 year warranty. What happened to the 5 year warranty? And why? If you read on, we'll give you some hints. 2. This warranty is extended to the original purchaser of the equipment direct from CallerID.com as well as customers of dealers and distributors for CallerID.com products. This warranty is not transferable to any other parties. Response 2. We only extend the warranty to the purchaser that pays us 10 bucks. The Identifier can be transferred to other parties. The Identifier loves a good party, the more the merrier. What do we care who currently owns the unit. We have so few failures it just does not matter. We know when each unit was manufactured and sold just by looking at it. We don't require any proof of purchase. Once an Identifier got hit by lightning at a Laundry in New York. The customer had bought the unit from someone that bought it from us with a stolen credit card number. We still took care of them. 3. The 2 year warranty covers all parts and labor required to repair equipment manufactured by CallerID.com. Shipping costs are not covered under the warranty. Response 3. If we have to worry about shipping cost, we have bigger problems. We do ask to see the unit before replacing it because more than 99% of units that people think are defective actually are not. The overwhelming cause of problems are due to Windows or the PC. Due to our diagnostic procedure most "failures" are solved with a quick phone call. Some people would rather send the unit back for testing than diagnose the problem. For them we test it, and send it back. And we don't charge for shipping. When a unit requires "repair" we don't repair them. We put in a brand new board and send it back. All but a couple of failures since 1993 were because they got hit by lightning. 4. CallerID.com will repair product with new or rebuilt parts, free of charge, at the CallerID.com repair facility in Norcross, GA within two years from the date of the purchase. Purchase date will be determined by purchase receipt, other proof of purchase date, or serial number Response 4. Rebuilt parts? What that about? Where do they get rebuilt parts? What do they have in there? A carburetor? An alternator? Proof of purchase? Forget that! Repair facility? Why do they need a whole repair facility? We don't even have a support department or support person for that matter. We're better than Maytag. 5. A return material authorization (RMA) number is required before returning equipment for repair. Please contact CallerID.com to obtain an RMA number. Response 5. We don't have RMA numbers. So few units are shipped back that we don't need a formal procedure. Just let us know, somehow, where to ship it back. Especially if you ship it to us with the return address of the UPS store. 6. The warranty covers failures in materials or components occurring during normal use. It does not cover damage which occurs in shipment; failures which result from water damage, fire damage, accident, misuse, abuse, neglect, mishandling, misapplication, alteration, modification or unintended use of product; or service by anyone other than an authorized CallerID.com repair facility. Response 6. Do we really want to argue with a customer or dealer over how a unit died. As long as the enclosure can hold a new circuit board it was not "misused". If the unit was run over by a truck and it won't hold a circuit board then we'd have to talk about it. That has never happened yet so it's a moot point. Water damage? They shouldn't use parts that can be damaged by water. Why should a customer be responsible for damage caused in shipping? All these years we've never had a unit damaged in shipping. They've been lost and stolen in transit, we just send another. Why should it be the customer's problem? "authorized CallerID.com repair facility"? They got to be kidding. Go ahead let your kid or nephew take a crack at it. If he can't resolve the problem, we will. If he blows it up... so what? We'll replace it. Fire damage? Don't make a unit with a cheap plastic case. Now a material failure? What is that? Once a long time ago we had a unit fail due to a component failure, but a material failure? What is a material failure? How does material fail? Maybe they are a little too materialistic. 7. The warranty does not cover equipment struck by lightning or catastrophic power surges on either AC power line or phone lines. Such events are identified when three or more components on the circuit board have suffered damage and/or electrical traces have been burned or vaporized. Response 7. It's so cool to see a vaporized part. It's worth it just to see it. Send us your vaporized Identifier and we'll cover it under warranty. Or we'll replace the circuit board at our cost if it's not under warranty. How would we even know how many parts "suffered damage". We just look at the parts that had their covers blown off by the lightning, show it to everybody, and give you a new board. Here's the real scoop on why we cover lightning. We could have added lightning protection to the circuit board. We were the ones that chose not to add the protection. So we couldn't, in good conscious, put that burden on the customer. It would have cost us about $1 per line to add an effective protection circuit. At one dollar per line and thousands of units sold, we saved so much money, we can easily afford to cover a few lightning hits a year. If we didn't cover lightning we might get into an argument with a customer over whether or not it got hit by lightning. That would not be right, don't want to go there. When a customer calls and a unit has actually failed the first question asked is "Did you have a lightning storm"? Immediately followed by, before they can answer, that's it's OK because lightning is covered. This way we will get an honest answer. This way we don't have to do a failure analysis on a unit that got hit by lightning. Avoiding one failure analysis will save enough to pay for years of units struck by lightning. When we built the first few Identifiers back in 1993 we wired a telephone plug to an electrical cord and plugged it in the wall. No, we're not all that crazy. We actually did that to test the 60hz filter. The test was successful. Go ahead try it. I'm not worried, neither should you be. In case that would make you nervous, remember we cover "catastrophic power surges" under warranty. Not that 110 Volts could cause any harm to an Identifier. Then they say: "Remember that property insurance normally covers equipment failure due to floods, lightning, and power surges. We are happy to fill out any forms necessary to complete an insurance claim." Last Response. We would never be happy to fill out an insurance form. We all hate filling out insurance forms. Why should we put our customers through that agony? Especially after they obviously have a flood or something else to take care of. Why is flood a problem? Oh yeah, the water damaged and rebuilt parts. Just for fun a few years ago I purposely dropped an Identifier in a murky canal (we're in Florida). Took it out, disassembled it, hosed it off, and it's still working today. Call us, see if it still works. It's the unit that sends your Caller ID to our computer. Lies, Misleading Statements, or Twisted Truth?The competitor's web site quotes (out of context) from Computer Telephony Magazine, "The most capable and lowest cost CID box on the market". What they left out was the beginning of the sentence that actually said: "If they had implemented these features, it would be the most capable..." They are not the lowest cost unit while being a lower quality and cheaply manufactured unit. What really bugged us was the capital T in The. They could have at least done an almost honest twist by doing a ...the most capableThey boast "Computer Telephony Magazine, Product of the Year". Product of Year is something you pay for, it is not earned, unlike Editors' Choice. The competitor claims "ninety-five percent of the world wide market". I don't know this to be true or false and certainly neither do they. Both of us are private companies so sales are not public knowledge. Here they go again with that 95%, they say "Over 95% of all Point of Sale (POS) companies that provide Caller ID integration in their applications now use products manufactured by CallerID.com." Again I don't know whether their 95% is true or not but a large percentage of our sales are to restaurants using off the shelf POS software. Did you know 47% of all statistics are fabricated? Well the 47% is a fabricated statistic, but the actual number is probably higher. What are the statistical odds that a company has exactly 95% of two dissimilar markets? If we only have 5% of any caller id market, that's OK. All we care about is satisfied customers a couple of bucks left over after making payroll and paying the rent. Why be so greedy, especially if it's not true and does not make any difference?
Shoddy Engineering and Cheap ManufacturingYeah I know it's not a nice thing to say and goes against the rules of good etiquette, but....Some years ago we acquired the competitor's 4 line box from a client of ours that switched from them to us. It has a horrible assembly job (See pictures below).
 Competitor's Close Up The above close up picture shows resistors inserted vertically with poorly bent leads and shorted to the adjacent component. For reliability purpose a component lead should never be bent near the components body. In this picture you can see the separation between the lead and component body caused by the strain induced by the improper bends. You know what really sucks about this. There is plenty of space for these components to be mounted laying down on their side like they are intended to be mounted. Notice the strain on the component body by the bending of the leads especially on R46 (far right resistor). This would never pass a Bellcore quality control inspection. Notice the 2 component leads (D12 & R46) shorted together. Very poor design and manufacturing quality control. Also notice the 100K resistor (R46), the lead is bent so close to the body of the resistor the body has an opening due to the stress caused by bending the lead. There should always be a strain relief between where the lead is bent and the body of the resistor. Horrific design and manufacturing. The picture below shows a capacitor soldered directly to the leads of a voltage regulator.
 Competitor's Power Supply Kludge. This capacitor was obviously an afterthought symptomatic of poor quality design methods and was probably added to reduce an electrical noise problem which is more prevalent on a cheap 2 layer board. But worse is the awful assembly technique of soldering the capacitor to another component. The voltage regulator acts as a heat sink increasing the probability of a dull cold solder joint which is exactly what happened. This caused one lead on the capacitor to break free. The capacitor soldered to the voltage regulators legs was an after thought to band-aid a poor power supply design. It is an unacceptable practice to use solder to make an electrical connection. First the leads of the capacitor must be affixed to the legs of the voltage regulator where a solid electrical connection is made before being soldered. As you can see why. The lead of the capacitor came loose from the voltage regulator. (no I did not yank it off, it came loose on its own) Also notice the blue vertical capacitor on the far right. It has a value of 100uF (see side of capacitor). The silk screen on the PC Board says 10 uF. The hole spacing on the PC Board is not aligned with the leads of the capacitor. Not only is there no hardware handshaking on the serial port but no UART or FIFO buffer as well. A mediocre design will have at least one or two of these features. This design has none. Our Identifier has all of the above. The UART with hardware handshaking and FIFO buffer in the Identifier will eliminate data overruns to insure no loss of data when the PC is too busy to immediately respond to incoming data. Diagnostics is an important feature. Diagnostics cannot be done without Hardware Handshaking. The Identifier monitors the handshaking signals from the PC's serial port to determine its state. For more information on diagnostics click on "Diagnostics" at the top of this page.
 Competitor's Analog Phone Line Interface The competitor's product uses a hybrid transformer (left of center) front end and RC filter that adds a load to the line reducing volume level at the phone and cannot receive low caller ID signal levels. The second black box from the left is a mechanical relay for their "pass thru" feature. If you plan to get the competitor's stuff, you should not to use their pass through feature. This pass through used to suppress the first ring uses a mechanical relay and has been known to get stuck open effectively cutting the connection and not allowing the call to pass through and you will never hear the phone ring. This problem was reported by a Computer Telephony Magazine editor (Stuart Warren) who experienced this problem while reviewing their unit. And suppressing the first ring, reduces response time (you do not hear the first ring) leading to more abandoned unanswered calls. YES Telecom uses an active two stage amplifier (LF347) to pre-condition the Caller ID and Touch Tone signals rather than just a passive RC filter. Ours is a high impedance phone line input that cannot interfere with the phone line's signal quality or induce crosstalk. Circuit Design. I have over 30 years experience developing telephone and data communications equipment (see experience below). Even at that I hired the best engineer I’ve ever met in my 30 years in the telecom industry to design this product. The Identifier is proven, with 15 years field experience, to be extremely reliable and robust with a less than 0.01% failure rate.
ExperienceMr. Patrick Young, YES Telecom founder, has 30 years of experience in communications engineering and software development.Patrick has an extensive engineering background in voice, data, and IP communications in both hardware and software development. Recipient of Computer Telephony Magazine's Editors' Choice Award for the Identifier and Best of The Best of Show, Editors' Choice Award for design of an IP Communications and Security Platform. Designed with Green Technology having the Industries best performance per Watt Ratio. Patrick is an expert on TDM, packet, and IP Communications design, IP and VoIP Security, and Green (energy efficient) Computer Design. His experience includes:
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