What's hot in unified comms? We ask Geelong Telephone Company

Which UC solutions do you deploy?

We have access to NEC and Ericsson-LG, and our cloud technology also provides full collaboration.

When did your company first get involved in UC?

We started selling telephone services in 1985 and while UC has been around since the mid-1990s, we only started selling it last November. 

Which UC certifications and/or credentials does your company have?

All our technicians are Cert IV qualified in telecommunications. We’re accredited on the NEC, Ericsson-LG, Panasonic and hybrids including our cloud solution.

Who are your main distributors for UC technologies?

We go direct to the vendor.

What cool or interesting recent UC technology have you heard of lately?

It’s getting total integration or collaboration between the applications. I feel that Huawei is more open than a lot of other solutions – its UC solution integrates with the Lync server and CallManager from Cisco.

Can you tell us about a recent UC deployment you have done?

We just went into quite a conservative Catholic school with a VoIP solution. We convinced them they can use their [network] infrastructure for their phone handsets.

On investigation, I found nearly every teacher has a tablet, so I said how about we have a softphone for the tablet because they were going to buy another 40 phones for the teachers. They’re finding it very useful for their teachers, especially roaming because they can bring the phone with them wherever they are.

What is driving customers’ UC projects?

We need high-speed links to use UC effectively. We have CODECs but it’s been one of the reasons why UC has been a bit slow because a lot of compression algorithms [suffer] with flaky bandwidth. We need the fast pipes. And companies need to have that before UC can take off.

UC is...?

A way that we can collaborate and communicate anywhere, anyhow and at any time.