Merging voice, video and data on campus

Sydney-based specialist integrator NSC has carved out a niche in the burgeoning IP telephony network space.

Last year, it completed the deployment of one of Australia’s largest IP telephony networks to date for the Australian National University in Canberra. The deployment included the design, implementation and management of the university’s intercampus network (ICN).

The ANU ICN upgrade tender initially identified streamlining campus technology and cost savings as its major goals. ANU also wanted the network to serve as a building block in a communications infrastructure of international standards.

Most importantly, however, what the ANU needed was an ICN capable of converging its data, voice and video services onto a common IP fabric. They thus opted for an IP telephony solution, provided by NSC, to replace its ageing PABX voice system.

With 3200 staff and 12,000 users across 130 ANU buildings and three remote campuses all requiring varying levels of access to the ICN, the deployment presented a number of challenges for NSC, which had previously delivered implementations mainly to the SMB market with at most around 2000 users.

Levels of complexity

According to NSC chairman and founder Craig Neil, the complexity involved in a major IP telephony deployment is directly proportional to the expertise present in a customer’s IT department.

"It is essential that prospective customers have a reasonable handle on their voice and data infrastructure. Once they outsource an integrator and a good relationship is established and the engineers understand what each other’s objectives are, merging voice and data into one group can, as in the case with the ANU deployment, occur relatively seamlessly," Neil says. "The IT people at ANU were fantastic to work with. It was a big project and a stringent process, but it went like clockwork, due to the fact that they were technically clever."

The other prerequisite for an organisation pursuing an IP telephony system is the existence of a functioning data network that can support the technology. Neil says it is mandatory that customers do certain tests to look at the design of their networks, the earlier the better, especially in regards to basic equipment such as switches, ports and hubs. The ANU had a distinct advantage, Neil says, because its data network was already highly functional.

Initial investment

In the initial stages of a deployment such as this example for ANU, an investment of only a few thousand dollars may be required to ascertain what exactly needs to be done.

"We put equipment onto the network to measure its performance and compatibility, met with the IT group and got a network diagram to fi nd out which switches were OK," Neil says. Once the specifics of the features and functions required were also ascertained, the cost of the network’s design and implementation could then be summarised. Neil does not offer specifics on the total cost of the network, though he does say that it was "extremely competitive". He adds that smaller implementations for around 2000 users generally cost around $100,000, depending on the state of the customer’s existing network.

On completion, the new ICN IP telephony system had 10,000 end points, scaleable to 15,000, making it one of the largest in the Southern Hemisphere. Fifteen hundred handsets were initially deployed replacing the obsolete handsets of the old PABX. That number has since grown to 4000.

Benefits

Neil says ANU achieved huge cost savings in the 12 months since the completion of the ICN telephony deployment, not only in phone calls but in upgrades to the PABX system. Also, the university can now run video applications over the network, giving it true network triple play voice, video and data capabilities.

"In the case of ANU, there is a tremendous amount of information sharing, so the ability to exchange data, make cheap voice calls and show lectures via video has been of immeasurable benefit," Neil says. "They now have a state-of-the-art infrastructure ready to adopt new applications, which they can layer in over their network."

A single network management and support service has been implemented throughout the campus to manage the new fully-integrated infrastructure. NSC says the design of the ICN delivers 99.999 percent availability to the core network and voice servers. The ICN is managed by a single support team, meeting the service levels for all network and communications services.

A single disaster recovery strategy was also implemented, covering both data communications and voice services. Under the common IP fabric, both computing and telephony can be re-established in an hour, compared to up to a one-week wait if the former external copper cable plant was damaged, NSC says.

Neil says there are three main reasons why organisations should make the upgrade to IP telephony. The fi rst is the ability to have a centralised architecture, which brings with it a number of effi ciencies, such as not having to upgrade 10 PABXs. The second is the obvious saving in call costs and the third is the savings in installation sites.

Neil says the infrastructure is more than VoIP. Rather, it is a complete IP telephony system offering administrative effi ciency gains and fi nancial benefi ts on several levels.

As awareness of the benefits of this technology increase, organisations are starting to realise VoIP is a strategic move towards improved operations and valueadd performance, Neil says. IP telephony also uses applications to enhance the way a customer does business and to more cheaply solve business problems.

By converging voice and data, it enables organisations to take advantage of a single unified network, facilitating efficiencies, driving lower transaction costs, enabling higher levels of customer service and providing flexible solutions for business locations, Neil adds.

"Far from just using it to make phone calls, IP telephony applications can [affect] strategic objectives and solve real business problems."

According to Neil, structured cabling for new and refurbished buildings can provide a saving of 50 percent of the cost of traditional infrastructure because IP phones with 3-port Ethernet switches on a standard desktop need only one communications port, rather than the parallel telephone structured cabling originally used.

Neil says the whole VoIP implementation process took about nine months to complete from start to finish. The evaluation process, putting a contract in place following the university’s original tender, short-listing and final testing took three to four months, followed by an implementation period of around five months. ANU already had a data network that was ready, greatly expediting the process, Neil adds.

Some implementations prove to be a lot trickier, he says. Many organisations are simply not up to skill or speed, while others cannot make a decision, even after a year. Neil also points out that finding suitable customers can sometimes be tricky, because for some it’s still not worth the level of initial time and investment required to move to an IP telephony model, especially if they’ve recently made a large IT infrastructure investment.

One example he gives is of a large stockbroking house that has been running on reliable Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) technology, where there is more risk involved in changing the phone system. "Where every call is potentially worth thousands of dollars, it makes more sense to stay with what is currently working," he says.

IDC analyst Susana Vidal Little says that, when it comes to major IP infrastructure deployments, Australian channel players need to offer a customer a solution that fits their budget, business and technical requirements. Earning certification for each of the IP telephony equipment providers requires a large financial investment, but one that can ultimately be worth it because they can have a captive market, Vidal Little adds.

Neil says one of the greatest barriers to change was a general ignorance on the part of customers of what VoIP and IP telephony actually are. What NSC offers with its IP telephony deployments, Neil says, is true VoIP in a controlled environment over a LAN or WAN, not uncontrolled voice over IP out over the public internet, where there is no quality of service grading and there is no way 99.9999 percent reliability can be guaranteed.

Silver service

The ANU VoIP implementation comes on top of another large-scale Avaya IP telephony deployment for Melbournebased Silver Top Taxis Service, enabling the delivery of applications to remote sites. It also allowed the service to offer access to its technology infrastructure and customised applications to other taxi companies.

Silver Top Taxi Service has around 1850 taxis attached to its network. The Silver Service solution provides text-tospeech, which reads back customer address information, links mobile phones with location information and enhances the routing of callers identifi ed as having a current booking, NSC says.

Before the deployment, taxi companies had been fi elding enquiries for up to 90 cars using an agent who may only take a few calls through the night. It had not been cost-effective for these companies to deploy communication applications such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and text-to-speech, which help automate bookings.

Neil says the Silver Service solution was engineered to deliver applications such as text-to-speech to remote sites, which gave it the potential to increase successful automated bookings to about 33 percent, giving the customer significant savings and operational efficiencies.

"What this means for the taxi industry is that calls from satellite suburbs or anywhere in Australia can now come through to Silver Top Taxi Service’s new system and be handled by the IVR or text-to-speech system and cost-effectively handle dispatches," Neil says.

"Importantly, local operators remain in control of their business. The IP Telephony solution is simply providing cost-effective access to smart applications previously out of reach," he adds.

Silver Service receives some 500,000 calls a month, of which roughly 90,000 to 100,000 are automated with the company’s current IVR system.

With the introduction of text-tospeech, Silver Service hopes to increase the percentage of automated bookings from 20 to 40 percent.

The text-to-speech application reads the address contained in the database back to the customer, increasing customer confi dence in the booking. It also lowers administration costs and improves customer and driver satisfaction by capturing incorrect pick-up addresses prior to a dispatch.

NSC says earlier this year that strong growth in the telecommunications sector was expected to nearly triple its revenues to $100 million by 2006.

The company has relocated its Sydney head office from Epping to larger premises in North Ryde and has also added staff in Sydney and Canberra and opened offices in Adelaide and Perth as part of a restructure that divided the company into the two subsidiaries, NSC Enterprise Solutions and NSC Carrier Technology.

"For the past two years, we’ve had about 35 percent growth by revenue year-on-year and that’s encouraging," Neil says.