The NEC XN120 complete phone system safely arrived 24 hours earlier than expected to the capital of the Marshall Islands, Majuro, which is inhabited by just 25,000 residents!
“There was no shortage of staff wanting to take the delivery by hand,” joked Nimans’ Account Manager Peter Houghton who took the order from Ron Kihlken, the Managing Director of Glasgow-based T.M.I. Limited.
“It’s not every day we get involved with an order being despatched to the other side of the world. We’ve had international orders before but I’m not aware of anything on this scale. It only took three days for the order to arrive in Honolulu before being transported direct to the customer.”
The story began when Ron received a request from a construction industry client to quote for a communication system with a capacity of six analogue lines and eighteen extensions.
Ron explained: “On the face of it this was not an unusual request but as the system was to be installed thousands of miles away, it was not to be handled as a standard project!”
Majuro is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and does not have any of the technical system configuration issues found in Europe. According to Ron there are just two supermarkets on the island.
He had a close look at the island’s communication standards and concluded they were a mixture of American and European. The most 'international' system in the T.M.I.
Portfolio Ron felt most appropriate was the XN120.
T.M.I. has sold over 50 of these systems and has found them to be both reliable and extremely flexible. Discussions with NEC confirmed that no ‘type approval’ had been issued and no specific NEC organisation controlled sales/maintenance of systems sold to the islands. They gave Ron the go-ahead to sell the system and assisted him by answering several technical questions and sending a detailed specification.
After several days of discussion, the deal was done and six days after payment was received the XN120 was in Majuro.
Ron, who is a long-standing Nimans customer says he was grateful for assistance from Simon Bell at ToneTel Telecom in Surrey who provided technical knowledge to get the application up and running.
Ron added: "It's remarkable that by using the XN120's remote maintenance features, we can fine tune the configuration quicker than we can some systems installed just a few miles away. We've supplied over 50 XN120’s and with the enhanced features found in version 6.0 we intend using it as the core to our traditional and VoIP solutions.
“Nimans delivered the equipment in exceptional time, and the new system, which went live in January is already proving popular with the islanders”.