Baxters

In just two months, a leading international supplier of healthcare equipment & pharmaceuticals has switched from ISDN to VoIP, dramatically cutting its telecoms costs and greatly enhancing the functionality of its voice and data communications.

Timico originally approached the healthcare company in 2005 offering a high-speed broadband service to replace its existing ISDN system. Although the company had already been experimenting with VoIP, the trials had been costly and the communications had been unencrypted and therefore not secure.

With the introduction of Timico's DSL Max 8 service, data transmission speeds immediately increased from 500 kilobits to as much as 8 megabits per second (exact speeds depended on the public infrastructure capabilities in any given area). This service was rolled out to the company's field-force of about 200 people from Scotland to Southampton in only two months during 2006.

The rapid transition from ISDN to faster broadband had the immediate impact of reducing annual telephone costs, sometimes as much as tenfold and more since leased lines were no longer necessary. The new hardware requirements were minimal and, in every case, in line with a necessary general upgrade.

The next phase was to replace the existing PBX exchange system with VoIP. Initially this focused on the company's Small Offices Network (which have up to six onsite personnel) and the Premium Home Office users (those with additional facilities to regular home office users). The company's global corporate policy requires that connections for such users are highly secure, so a VPN was an essential component of the deployment.

Migration to the new broadband and VoIP system is being streamlined to dovetail with the ending of individual 12-month contracts for home users' existing connections. Timico's negotiating power with fixed line telecoms providers has given the healthcare company the ability to terminate individual user contracts at one month's notice, thus giving the healthcare company much greater flexibility and significant cost savings. Timico's rolling one-month billing regime has also been customised to the precise requirements of the customer.

"The benefits to our company have been considerable," explained the company IT Manager. "Firstly cost savings have been very large. Secondly we have a far better broadband product. And thirdly there was no disruption to business as Timico made the transfer virtually seamless. The whole changeover has been fairly low profile as far as users are concerned and many may even be unaware that the switchover ever happened! The new system is much more cost effective - the alternative, PBXs with leased lines would have been inefficient, outdated and extremely costly."

The IT Manager continued: "Although as a matter of course I had to keep the Board informed of the telecoms initiative and its progress, I haven't had to seek its approval at every stage. We knew change was necessary - but because it saved money rather than increased costs, I enjoyed more autonomy than would be usual in such a radical transformation. Generally for each installation, the conversion from ISDN to VoIP has paid for itself within nine months."

Charles Airey, Operations Manager at Timico, commented: "The fundamentals of the telecoms solution for the customer were similar to many of our deployments, but because of the nature of their business, the specification had to be especially tight. We recognised that security was paramount and implemented a VPN, but, as a medical company, uninterrupted service is a top priority, so we have provided a 99.9% operational level service agreement."