Bury Metropolitan Borough Council originally looked into moving to an IP telephony solution because its traditional telephone service was becoming more and more expensive. The goal was to find a way of enhancing the council ’s communications network while tightly controlling costs.
Bury Metropolitan Borough Council briefly considered replacing its 12-month old non-PoE-enabled Cisco switches with new PoE-enabled Cisco switches, but the ‘rip and replace’ costs were too great. By using PowerDsine Midspans, the council was able to prolong the life of its existing network infrastructure by about five years, while also benefiting from extremely cost-effective PoE-enabled IP communications technologies.
On the advice of reseller Absolute Network Solutions, Bury Metropolitan Borough Council installed a mix of 24 (model 6024) and 12 (model 6012) port Midspans to power the Avaya IP phones. The sheer number of sites and the variation in the number of IP phones installed at each site required a scalable solution. To address this requirement, 24 and 12 port Midspans were deployed to power the IP phones in the main council buildings, with simple power blocks being used in smaller council buildings where only two or three handsets were needed.
Bury Metropolitan Borough Council plans to deploy more VoIP installations as more buildings are brought under council control. The council also plans to provide Councillors and home workers with a secure work VoIP handset, using a USB connection to a PC over a broadband network.