Crosstalk with Select Telecom (Spring 2013)
One long-time client of Select Telecom started off 2012 with a crippling $45,000/month in telephone service bills across its 25+ Westchester office locations. With the Great Recession on its heels, the company was faced with a turbulent marketplace and growing strains that made it clear it was time for a change. After a long-standing relationship with Select Telecom, they knew where to turn for help with cutting back on their telecom costs.
After researching many service carriers, the company still hadn’t found the cost-effective solution they were looking for. Select Telecom stepped in to suggest that a new IP unified communication system from ShoreTel might be able to drop their monthly costs even lower than a service change alone.
In addition to recommending a new system, over the course of several months Select Telecom also worked closely with the firm’s IT director to gauge the bandwidth from different carriers and evaluate data devices that could be installed at each office to replace their existing MPLS with lower-cost bandwidth. A potential solution was found in Mushroom Networks’ Truffle, a wide area network (WAN) virtualization appliance that uses Mushroom’s innovative Broadband Bonding technique to meld large numbers of Internet broadband lines into a single connection.
With the proper equipment identified, Select Telecom focused on replacing the company’s expensive MPLS with fiber optic cable at the company’s two main hub sites and installed cable modems at each office (replacing their MPLS circuits) to introduce more efficient connectivity between the branch offices and main hubs. In addition, as the ShoreTel phones were deployed at each office, Select Telecom also changed the existing data switches to a high-end Brocade PoE switches for faster speeds and higher reliability.
The result of the equipment upgrades and carrier changes was a whopping $23,000/month in cost savings, cutting their monthly number to an average of $22,000, half of what it was before. Even better, these savings will pay for all of the customer’s new data devices, PoE data switches and new IP telephone systems in about 40 months.
The new additions from ShoreTel and Mushroom Networks have allowed this company to establish a fully-redundant telecom solution with automated failover for their data and VoIP services, strengthening their business continuity position. In addition, their WAN speeds are about 75 times faster than before. And as internet bandwidth prices continue to become more affordable, the company is primed to add more circuits at each office to create an even more resilient network for the future – all while enjoying the productivity and security advantages of a modern UC phone system that will bring them more efficient and robust communications for years to come.