Hillsong Church praises Avaya reseller for instant networks

AGC Networks has rolled out an IP-based multicast virtual network for the Australian branch of the Hillsong Church.

Headquartered in Baulkham Hills in Sydney, Hillsong is a Pentecostal church with over 25 sites across Australia. It conducts services and events every weekend for its more than 45,000 members.

The church's legacy network, based on Cisco routers and switches, was unable to push content to its entire network with the same level of quality.

The Sydney branch of multinational integrator AGC was commissioned to roll out a new virtualised network using Avaya's Virtual Services Platform 4000 series, 7200 series and 8000 series, along with Avaya Fabric Connect.

Hillsong now has the ability to instantaneously switch in a high-bandwidth and high availability environment during services or conferences.

The church recently held a conference for 30,000 members and was able to build its network within a day. Normally it would have taken at least three days.

AGC vice president and country manager Tony Heywood said the time it takes for Hillsong to deploy a new network has been reduced to one-fourteenth of what it used to be.

"It was actually such a simple deployment that the customer is able to learn it once and then do the deployment themselves," said Heywood.

"All of the AGC value was upfront with doing the consulting and configuring the network and helping the customer get to the point where they know that this will solve the problems."

He added that in the old network environment, it would take a team of two to three people working for three days to set up a network. The new network is now supported by just one network administrator and one support staff.

Hillsong head of audio and infrastructure Ricki Cook said the Avaya technology allows it to create a network core that can push multi-gigabits of data across its major locations - whether they're in Sydney, Newcastle, Brisbane or Melbourne.

"Using Avaya SDN Fx, we are able to provide reliable multicast video to 45,000 people each week right across Australia. With on-demand access to real-time streams from all our sites, the regional campuses can stay connected, and our wider community stays engaged," said Cook.

AGC Networks is a global solutions integrator and Avaya platinum partner with its head office in India.