PHILIPS IP TELEPHONY SYSTEM IS TOP OF THE CLASS

PHILIPS IP TELEPHONY SYSTEM IS TOP OF THE CLASS

AT SELBY COLLEGE

- Further education institution expects to save £10,000 per year

as it starts first phase of migration to a fully converged network

Selby College, one of the top ten further education establishments in the UK has installed a hybrid IP telephony system from Philips Business Communications in order to improve the efficiency of call management and customer service throughout the college, as well as to future-proof its network infrastructure.

In an order valued at £40,000, Philips Business Communications (PBC) switched Selby College to its SOPHO 2000 IPS system, which is capable of supporting both packet-switched IP and circuit-switched traditional (TDM) telephony. The SOPHO 2000 IPS system will support a mixture of analogue lines for basic phone requirements and digital lines for more advanced features such as caller identification, call re-routing and auto-dialling, whilst offering peer-to-peer IP telephony capability between the main site and its five local community outreach centres in the surrounding areas.

Mike Pilling, IT Manager at Selby College, explains, “The SOPHO 2000 IPS system gives us the ability to replace separate voice and data links between our main college and our five outreach centres with a converged VoIP communication infrastructure which presents significant cost savings. However, we also wanted to maintain a TDM telephony environment at our main college site and therefore it was essential that the new system could function within and support a hybrid network, with traditional digital and analogue switching capabilities.”

He continues, “The SOPHO 2000 IPS gives us the flexibility to design the architecture of our telephony infrastructure in a way that most appropriately suits our current requirements, whilst still being able to lay the foundation for future networks. This means that we can migrate towards a fully converged network at a pace which suits us.”