VoIP Rolls In At Senior Living Center

I’m chuckling that this would be the imaginary newspaper headline of such a breakthrough story. It does illustrate just how far we are along the acceptance curve of VoIp and the hosted PBX.

This past week, we did a VoIP setup for Pacific Gardens located in the San Jose area.  When I met with the principal, her primary criteria was finding a local hosted pbx provider. 

She said, “I want simple VoIP. I want the advantages that a cloud based PBX brings, but I don’t want to deal with the technical complexity. I want a local VoIP vendor who comes on site, discovers my exact requirements and implements the solution without my involvement.”

Their existing Siemens PBX was beginning to show signs of failure and management was tired of dealing with service calls and unhappy callers. So, we showed the value of VoIP in their environment and they were anxious to get their problems resolved.  

Below are a few of the “moving parts” that were required to implement their solution:

• New Data Circuit: The customer was concerned about putting all of their data and voice traffic over their existing Comcast circuit. So, we brought in a TelePacific T1 and connected both that circuit and the Comcast circuit onto a two port WAN router. This gave the customer redundant data circuits and gave them additional bandwidth.
• New Router: They had an ancient Cisco router that wasn’t up to the task of handling VoIP traffic.  We replaced it with a voice-enabled router which solved the problem, plus it gave them piece-of-mind, knowing that they had a new piece of hardware, less prone to failure.
• Cabling Challenges: During the implementation process, TeleDynamic engineers discovered that their existing data cabling wasn’t adequate to support voice. I have to hand it to our guys who found inexpensive methods to address the weak points and bringing the network up to snuff. The customer would have had severe sticker shock had we told them a re-wiring was going to be necessary.  I marvel at how many of our competitors insist on having customers do unnecessary wiring jobs in preparation for VoIP.

The items detailed above are just part of our job, but reflecting upon this implementation, I can really appreciate our customer’s initial requirement of “I want simple VoIP!”. I don’t quite know how she had sensed that the scope of the conversion process would require so much on-premise vendor time. In any event, we delivered on her requirements, with the heavy lifting done behind the scenes.