Law firm Clayton Utz has joined the growing number of distributed enterprises migrating from traditional PABX telephony systems to voice over IP with the introduction of a 35-handset network in Sydney.
Clayton Utz’s facilities manager Les Wark said the move to trial IP telephony was prompted by the opening of a new office in Adelaide and a slave PABX in Sydney being moved there.
IT was upgrading switches in Sydney and put the job out to tender, Wark said.
“Nortel Networks won the tender with its BayStack 4800 IP-PABX switches. A combination of quality, cost and experience with telecommunications and data networks won it,” he said.
Wark didn’t want to throw away the old PABX because of the investment made in late 1999.
Although Clayton Utz has no roadmap yet for further IP telephony deployment, Wark said the transition is “inevitable” for the company’s 2000 handsets across six interstate offices.
“Coming from a traditional telephony background, I don’t think moving to IP is a threat,” he said. “You’ve just got to keep up with technology and we need to move to VoIP because PABX upgrades are becoming more IP-like.”
At this time, Clayton Utz has built no redundancy measures into the design of its VoIP network it will introduce redundant links for the Sydney office.
“We are very happy with the quality of service of IP telephony and it’s as good as a landline,” Wark said. “We had a few teething problems such as network issues and echoing. Fiddling with frequencies fixed this. However, the network has never gone down and is very stable due to the new switches.”
Wark said although the company has good PABX people, managing IP telephony is different so all the staff are “going through a learning curve”.
Clayton Utz’s next move is to take advantage of more applications that can leverage a converged voice and data network.
“What interests me the most is staff using a softphone on a notebook to enable remote telephony,” Wark said.
Nortel Networks’ director of convergence solutions, Marie Hattar, said there is a lot of interest in “hybrid networks”.
“Many companies have a lot invested in TDM (time-division multiplexing) networks and don’t want to move away,” Hattar said.