Case study: National Jet Systems
With branch offices in eight Australian cities, Adelaide-based aviation contract company National Jet Systems (NJS) relies heavily on its Frame Relay wide area network to provide workers around the country with seamless access to maintenance, spare parts ordering, and other administrative applications.
Some time ago, NJS began using the Frame Relay to carry phone calls between sites. But as the company's voice call volumes increased, it became clear that its Marconi Frame Relay Access Devices (FRADs) were losing their ability to keep up.
That meant many callers were finding it hard to get an outside line when making calls between offices.
NJS began looking into alternatives, and after working with PABX supplier NEC decided the best upgrade was to shift its voice traffic onto IP using VoIP technology.
-Because of the nature of our business, we need to have a fairly diverse operation around Australia," says Steve Tucker, group IT manager at NJS.
-The justification for the WAN comes from [branch] offices because we have a high amount of voice and data activities. However, the bridged Frame Relay network wasn't capable of a true routed network that would give us toll bypass capabilities."
After months of planning, NJS's new environment went live in one busy night last June 13. At its core was an upgraded NEC PABX, which combined NJS' previous system with a NEON (NEC Enterprise Open Network) add-on card that gave the PABX VoIP support and IP trunking capabilities.
Although NJS was able to retain its existing phone handsets, engineers had to spend a considerable amount of time installing DHCP and DNS on servers, and changing network-related settings on its 380 client PCs. Since NJS hadn't used a routed network in the past, these upgrades were necessary to enable full least-cost routing and internal direction of VoIP traffic.
Through a single-supplier agreement with NEC, that company manages all of NJS' voice service, giving the company one point of contact compared with the three it had in the past. NEC, for its part, manages equipment issues as well as liaising with bandwidth supplier Optus. If NJS wants to add more phone extensions, it can simply install a new multi-port PABX card and plugs in from 8 to 32 new phones.
Relying on NEC to keep the solution running has helped NJS reap the benefits of VoIP without having to have expensive Cisco skills in house.
Within a few months of installing the VoIP solution, Tucker says its cost benefits were quickly becoming clear. Phone billsââ,¬"particularly for STD callsââ,¬"dropped by 27 percent initially, and nearly a year later NJS' phone bills are continuing to drop.
Because it's free of the limited bandwidth of Frame Relay, VoIP has also improved voice performance by ensuring that employees get a dial tone far more often than before.
This improved performance comes from the design of the new solution, in which voice traffic is switched off the carrier network onto the local network, then routed onto the network unchanged; by contrast, the previous solution was limited by the FRADs' ability to analyse and move the data.
-It's quite easy to see optimised results," says Tucker. -The previous equipment was nearing its capacity, but expansion is not an issue anymore: users are also confident because when they want to call another base, there are always circuits available."
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