One of the pieces of feedback I have had regarding my writings on IP Telephony has been that is seems all too hard and complicated.
To a large extent, I agree. Handsets, MAC addresses, PoE, CDP, VLAN separation, WAN QoS/CoS, DNS, DHCP, FTP and so on and so forth. This “acronym soup” applies just to a sites IP voice communication requirements !!
I am at the moment conducting an event series with our Telstra Business customers demonstrating and discussing the technical aspects above relevant to our hosted IP Telephony solution, Telstra IP Telephony (TIPT). As part of this series I discuss a new solution bundle that simplifys the overall process, taking much of the pain away from IP Telephony deployments in a true converged site solution that caters for data application requirements as well.
The solution is called Connect IP Telephony (already abbreviated by our Sales Teams to “CIP Tel”).
CIP Tel is a “turnkey solution” that addresses many of the challenges and concerns of customers who are not that IT savvy, and who are having some trouble in working through IP Telephony service delivery and support models (that is, the acronym soup above).
Targeted primarily for branch environments between 5 and 50 users, CIP Tel bundles technology elements such as handsets, router, switch, business grade IP access, IPVPN connectivity, Hosted IP-PBX feature set and secure Internet gateway in a managed services “wrap” where we go through the deployment aspects with our customers, offer face to face training, install handsets and provide a single point of contact helpdesk for end users and customer administrators alike. All this is provided within a single monthly price per site.
How is this a converged package?. Simple, in offering our customers the user based packaging options, we also support the selection of different site bandwidths. This ensures that adequate bandwidth not only exists for voice trunk requirements but also for data applications (eg Internet access, business applications etc). We do not “split” or dedicate access bandwidth for voice either, if no calls are being made, the entire access bandwidth is available for data applications.
In writing this blog, I just realised that I have written an advert for Connect IP Telephony. Certainly your Telstra Business or Enterprise and Government sales representatives can discuss the solution with you more but feel free to ask me any questions on this blog or you can mail me at craig.mulhearn@team.telstra.com.
Although I feel somewhat apologetic for such a blatant plug for CIP Tel in the public domain, I am very excited about the possibilities of this solution. Once installed, CIP Tel sites have full access to Telstra’s Next Dimension Working solution capabilities, want to add a Sales Mobility solution via NextG, no problem, how about centralising/virtualising your applications in one of Telstra’s Hosting centres, no problem either.