Design Overview

If you have read the Explanation section of this web site, you will have a fairly good understanding of correction software, and how PhoneSeal works.

This section explains the history of PhoneSeal's development, and the problems we had to resolve along the way to produce the most accurate area code correction solution available in the market today. If you are wrestling with issues of area code correction, you may find this very helpful in expanding your understanding of the correction process.

Developing the PhoneSeal Correction Suites

Now to answer the question: why are there three PhoneSeal correction suites?

At the outset, we wrote PhoneSeal, which was later renamed PhoneSeal Standard. We published a web site.

Then we were contacted by companies that had much more sophisticated correction needs. One of them, a major national retailer, had a customer file that had been created over the previous decade, containing over 6 million customers' details, along with their telephone numbers. These details had originated by customers filling out a form in the store, which had then been entered into their customer database by data entry operators. They had over 460,000 numbers that had no area code at all.

To make matters worse, they had no records that indicated when the data was entered into the file, so the numbers could have been entered over a decade ago, or they could have been entered yesterday!

They had downloaded the free PhoneSeal Analyzer, and tested it against their data. Their first processing run, using PhoneSeal Analyzer, took some 39 hours. In many cases, the telephone numbers were in areas that had been through multiple area code splits. As a result, their ambiguous number lists ran to hundreds of thousands of numbers!

We began work. There were four major tasks.

First, we had to increase the date range. PhoneSeal's internal database of area code splits only went back to 1995. However, our customer had many telephone numbers that they had collected prior to this date that had been affected by earlier splits.

To resolve this problem, we expanded our internal splits database to cover all splits since 1990.

Second problem: Reduce the ambiguous number count from the several hundred thousand mark. The expanded date range actually increased the existing ambiguous number issues! The solution was to implement another internal database, which associates Zip codes with the area code. This cut the list of ambiguous numbers down by about 98%.

Third problem: We needed to insert area codes into those 460,000 customer records which had no area code. Our new internal database, which contained Zip-to-area-code information, was the answer here. We were able to resuscitate these numbers by adding the area code information.

Fourth problem: this 39 hour processing time. Using sophisticated software engineering techniques, we were able to reduce this to 22 minutes, processing the data at over 100 times the speed of the original Phoneseal software.

The end result of this exercise became our new flagship product: PhoneSeal Professional.

Over the next month, we were contacted by many smaller users. They had important old customer files, in many cases less than 20,000 records, but these files had not been systematically maintained.They desperately needed the features of PhoneSeal Professional, but the software was too expensive.

The end result was the development of PhoneSeal Advanced. It processes the data using the slower processing engine of PhoneSeal Standard, but it incorporates all the features of PhoneSeal Professional. For smaller files, the processing speed is not an issue.

I am often asked why we don't just use the Zip code to area code database. Well, there are some Zip codes that have as many as four area codes! So it is essential for accuracy reasons to determine the possible splits, then use the ZipChecker to make a choice from the possible splits.

People ask us all the time why we bother continuing to sell PhoneSeal Standard.

The answer is pretty simple. PhoneSeal Standard is as good or better than any other software out there in the area code correction marketplace. There are some customers, with smaller, reasonably well maintained files, whose needs are well-met by PhoneSeal Standard.

But PhoneSeal Standard plays a more important role in relation to PhoneSeal Advanced and PhoneSeal Professional. It underlines the incredible performance and accuracy of these products, by providing a comparative benchmark.

In the evaluation process, many users download all three free Analyzers to help them decide which software will best suit their needs.