Voice over IP (VoIP) has revolutionised communications
at Bury Metropolitan Borough Council, and saved the local authority
hundreds of thousands of pounds.
The council implemented technology from Cisco and Avaya for VoIP
after years of incurring the cost of running and maintaining a
legacy telephony network and suffering a lack of now standard
system functionality.
Bury council estimates it has saved £200,000 per year over a
four-year period through its new VoIP network, against its former
BT Featurenet telecoms system. With £800,000 on immediate savings
alone, the council also expects a return on investment just two
years from September 2004 when the project went live.
Managing an increasingly expensive, ad hoc telephone network for
Bury was becoming a problem, following a decade of using BT
Featurenet. The BT Featurenet system was not manageable from a
central point, was inflexible, did not cover the whole borough as
BT had not enabled all the required exchanges, and was not serving
the daily operational needs of the 2,500-strong council
workforce.
On top of that, each of the 2,500 BT Featurenet handsets on the
network were charged to Bury at around £230 per year in call
commitment and additional call costs, totalling £600,000. Although
internal calls were free on BT Featurenet, because not all
extensions were not able to get onto the network the council was
losing out. With external calls charged on top of this,
unpredictable and large phone bills were created.
These issues and the fact that the BT Featurenet contract was
coming up for renewal forced the council to start looking for
another way to manage its communications infrastructure. Its
objectives were to provide employees with the resources they needed
to work more effectively and meet government e-policy stipulations,
save money, increase functionality, flexibility and manageability
on the network and invest in a future-proofed platform. The answer
was VoIP.
Search begins
Kevin Amos, technical
support manager at Bury, helped choose and oversee the
implementation of the new system. He says, “We wanted a VoIP system
that was going to be resilient, with tried and tested unified
communications. We also wanted proper reports on usage plus a call
centre package so we could get stats on the number of calls
received and how those calls were handled.”
In 2003 the council began looking into the relatively new area
of VoIP. It called in consultancy firm Improcom to oversee the
tendering process and implementation. Improcom introduced the
council to Nortel, Cisco, Avaya, Alcatel and Mitel. Amos says, “We
were just getting a feel for VoIP as it was still pretty new for
most people back then.”
Improcom advised the council that the first step was the network
itself, which needed a complete upgrade from its flat structure
running on 3Com switches. After much deliberation, Cisco technology
was chosen as the best option for a routed network with in-built
resilience.
The new network was centred around four sites, also known as the
main nodes. Each node runs a Cisco Catalyst switch, which means
there is added resiliency in the network, so if one or more
switches go down for whatever reason, there should be at least one
still operational to maintain at least part of the network. All the
other sites in the council were connected into the four nodes, one
of which, the Town Hall, is the key site for the entire
network.
The main node uses a Cisco Catalyst 6508 switch, the other three
nodes use Cisco Catalyst 4507 switches, and the other 150 switches
use the standard Cisco 2950T switch. With this technology the
network can distinguish between different types of traffic,
including public access, schools traffic and corporate traffic,
using virtual local area networks (VLans), providing quality of
service for voice and mission critical applications.
Yet the choice of Cisco routers presented Bury with its first
big issue. The council could either have Cisco switches that could
provide power over Ethernet, or switches without that
functionality. But it would depend on what type of VoIP phone the
council decided upon to determine which switch to implement.
“It was a chicken and egg situation,” says Amos. “We had started
to roll out switches to some buildings, but we had to stop because
of this problem about power over Ethernet. We had to decide what
phones we were going to get, then we could decide which switch we
were going to use.”
Bury put its network implementation on hold and began the
tendering process for a VoIP system. It looked at all the offerings
on the market and got it down to three: Avaya, Cisco and Mitel.
Avaya provided working, relevant reference sites, while both Cisco
and Mitel struggled to get that far. Avaya’s solution also seemed
to be the best fit and best overall value, despite not being the
cheapest offering. It won the tender and used partner, Sabio, to
get the solution installed.
The Avaya implementation for VoIP included its standard 46101 SW
phones with in-built switching, and the larger 4620 SW phones for
call centre functionality for certain workers. Also, the Avaya
Communications Manager switch was implemented. Part of that was
Avaya Call Centre to provide Bury with the reporting element it
required. Avaya’s unified messaging solution, Avaya Modular
Messaging, was installed, and also Avaya IP Softphones.
Additionally, the call logging element of the solution came from a
company suggested by Avaya in its tender, Proteus.
It was then just a case of working out how to make the Avaya
phones work on the Cisco network. As the Avaya phones were not
compatible with Cisco’s power over Ethernet switches, the plain
flavour switches were chosen and that implementation continued.
Reseller, Absolute Network Solutions, suggested that the council
get power to the Avaya phones using PowerDsine solutions, power
over Ethernet technology that pushes electricity and data over
Ethernet cables.
Problems
The implementation itself raised problems. Amos says, “An
implementation of this size is never straightforward. There were
quite a few council buildings that weren’t on the original BT
Featurenet network, so these had to be connected to the new
circuits, which takes time. Those buildings that weren’t going to
be connected to the new network due to geography had to have new
analogue lines installed, as otherwise when they finally switched
BT Featurenet off they would have no phone lines at all.”
To add to complications, at the time the implementation was
going on the council also tendered for its external telecoms
provider. BT, the existing provider, and Your Communications put
forward bids and Your Communications won based on cost. However,
when the council ordered new analogue lines for its sites that were
not joining the new network and for the die-hard members of staff
that were refusing to give up their fax machines, Your
Communications had to order them from BT.
Amos says, “We had a lot of occasions where BT said it had been
to certain sites, but when we looked for the new lines they weren’t
there or they weren’t in the right place. So that took time and
added more cost to the project.”
Many more problems arose during the rest of the implementation
and after in the form of quality of service issues. These were
caused by poor initial configuration of parts of the Avaya phone
system, a bad batch of Avaya phones that caused echo on calls and
the difficulties of trying to tweak BT copper lines so that quality
of service would be supported on VoIP by the partners in the
implementation. Yet through various upgrades, reconfigurations and
the use of a solution from Telindus to create quality of service
over copper wire, these teething problems have finally quietened
down.
Jonathan Buckle, account director for Avaya on this
implementation, says that these issues were nothing untoward: “This
was quite a large implementation using the big bang approach. It
involved a lot of change over a short period of time. Typically
when you do implementations of this kind, changes are made
throughout the roll-out. There are some fault finding requirements
that need to be done; it’s just a case of managing the risk
really.”
Lessons learnt
Amos says the council learnt a lot during the course of the
implementation, which began in December 2003. It was supposed to
finish in May 2004, but actually went live in September 2004 due to
an overrun. He says, “If we were doing this again, we would try not
to do it in such a rush. We upgraded our network and changed our
phone system at the same time, so we didn’t have enough staff to
cope with the change and had to get contractors in.”
Another aspect of moving so fast was not knowing as much as
would have been preferable, says Amos. “We relied a lot on Avaya
and Sabio. If we’d had a bit more experience on VoIP, we would have
picked up on a lot more of the problems we ran into beforehand. It
could have been useful to have employed someone with VoIP
experience for our own quality control, or it could have been more
in Avaya’s interests to oversee the implementation.”
The difficulty of changing the internal culture at the council
was also an area that Amos states could have been handled more
thoroughly. “As our original go-live date was May, we trained
people before then on the system,” he says. “When the date changed
to September, we tried to get people to use the new phones for
internal calls in the interim period but no one did, which was a
cultural issue. Then there was no pre-September training for the
system and people had forgotten how to use everything. Also, when
we did the original training the voicemail system and the soft
phones weren’t working, so when everything went live no one knew
how to use them. We could have planned that a lot better than we
did.”
Looking ahead
Through the new network, the
council is saving money and is reinvesting some of that back into
making its systems even more efficient, including lowering mobile
phone bills. Six months after the VoIP implementation was
completed, the council rolled out a mobile gateway solution through
its partner, Penine Telecom. The mobile gateways from manufacturer
Verling are estimated by the council to provide a saving of £60,000
over two years in call costs.
Amos adds that the call centre reporting functionality has aided
the council in more enhancements to its infrastructure. He
explains, “We are in the process of implementing a customer
relationship management solution, so the fact we have a call centre
solution in place really makes that easier.”
Next on the list is fixed mobile convergence (FMC). Amos is
excited about the possibilities this can open up for Bury. He says
an implementation of FMC is going to be the next big thing on the
‘to do’ list, but not until 2007 or 2008.
Amos sums up: “This network is much easier for us to manage and
scale. There’s still the odd thing we’re trying to resolve, but
nothing major. Now the network is settled, it’s a really good
system,” Amos enthuses.