Case study by Synertel

City Gains from VOIP

>>> home : products & solutions : case studies

The Town of Hillsborough contacted Synertel in late 1999 after failing to timely and adequate service from large national provider. After meeting with Assistant City Manager, Martha Debry, Synertel was able to stabilize the Town's voice environment and assure the Town that its voice environment was 100% Y2K-ready.. Synertel then embarked on a needs analysis with Ms. Debry. The Town's challenges included:

- Periodic flooding of the basement communications room where the PBX, voicemail, and critical public safety communication gear was located.

- Connecting 12 users at the Town's Corporation Yard (miles away) to the Town Hall telephony environment. Three Centrex lines and a handful of cordless phones were not adequate to serve the 20+ employees who work at the Yard. Reaching people was difficult, and leaving a voice message for a specific employee required many error-prone manual steps.

- Inability to save voice messages or record conversations for law enforcement purposes.

- Insufficient voice messaging ports to handle peak demand.

- The presence of mystery equipment in the network whose purpose was unknown.

- Data network performance was substandard and unreliable; users often lost work or experienced crashing.

- Multi-day outages due to poor response by the Town's dial tone and connectivity provider.

- Over-spending on dial tone and carrier charges.

Synertel developed a plan for the Town to address these problems. Over time:

- A new dry, clean space for critical voice equipment was prepared in TH's data center.

- The PBX, voicemail, backup power, T1 terminations, and fiber concentrators for the campus were relocated out of the flood zone.

- Voice Over IP was implemented between Town Hall and the Corporation Yard. Now anyone at a TH phone anywhere uses a 4 digit number to reach any other TH phone.

- Extraneous data link equipment was removed from the wide area network, eliminating extra IP hops, removing bottlenecks, and improving network performance markedly.

- The voice messaging system was doubled in size, and now includes Unified Messaging. Police and public safety officials can archive any voice message or recorded phone call for as long as needed on the Town's servers at the click of a mouse.

- TH's dial tone was resourced to a provider which offered both priority repair for government accounts and special municipal rates, providing a faster-response-to-outage environment at lower monthly cost.

- Synertel's G2 Solutions long distance service was implemented, saving money on every call over 17 miles from Town Hall.

Everyone at the Town of Hillsborough is now easily reachable, and employees communicate more effectively - no matter where their desk.