Oldham Council recently upgraded its telephone system, replacing separate voice and data connections across its various sites with a modern IP telephony system. The council also faced a challenging timescale in which to make the transition, owing to the impending expiry of its current managed service contract.

Oldham Council covers 55 square miles and employs 10,000 staff who service a population of over 219,000 people. In early 2004, the council started work on upgrading its voice and data network infrastructure across all its sites, with the aim of delivering a robust, scalable IP network for staff, visitors and the general public.

Responsibility for what would eventually become a full rollout of IP telephony fell to David Honeywell. Originally head of IT support for the council, he was transferred to an organisation called the Unity Partnership as programme manager. Unity is a joint venture involving the council and business services group Mouchel, with another private company ­ Agilisys ­ acting as the main ICT subcontractor.

Oldham’s existing telephone system was based on an Ericsson MD110 PBX, delivered as part of a five-year managed service contract. However, during the lifetime of this system, the council had invested in IP telephony on a piecemeal basis, introducing technology from communications provider Mitel wherever it was seen as appropriate. “There were some parts of Oldham Council’s business where IP telephony became a valid approach, so we were rolling out the odd Mitel controller here and there for specific remote sites,” said Honeywell.

It was then decided that the council should implement a converged solution to replace its existing infrastructure before the managed service contract ended. “About 18 months before the five-year managed service contract was due to expire, we looked at various options and decided there was only one choice ­ and that was to extend the Mitel solution we were already deploying to cover the rest of the network,” Honeywell added.

The council put together a request for a tender that was sent to five Mitel Gold partners, of which three responded. Of these, only communications services specialist Bailey Teswaine said it could deliver the project within the required timeframe, which turned out to be a lot shorter than was originally envisaged.

“The formation of the Unity Partnership kept getting delayed, and was not completed until May 2007 ­ very close to when our five year managed service contract was due to end,” explained Honeywell. This meant Bailey Teswaine had only five weeks to deploy the new system before the PBX service contract was due to expire. “Bailey Teswaine put their money where their mouth was ­ they said we can do this and you will not need to sign an extension to the managed service,” said Honeywell.

Quality of service
During the rollout, 75 Cisco switches were commissioned by the Unity Partnership to deliver quality of service across the 29 main telephony node sites. These were a mixture of 24-port and 48-port Cisco 3560 and 3750 models with power over Ethernet capability.

The upgrades took place out of hours and before deployment of the Mitel infrastructure. As part of the rollout, nearly 100 obsolete Cisco, Bay Networks and Netgear switches and hubs were swapped out, and cabinets and cabling were stripped out and re-patched.

About 2,500 extensions had to be migrated from one platform to another during the rollout. “We’re predominantly a Cisco house, but we also had a smattering of legacy equipment that was incapable of running voice over IP over the Mitel infrastructure,” said Honeywell.

Most of the council sites had 10/100Mbit/s connections, while the core network is gigabit Ethernet. The Unity teams ran tests to ensure that the bandwidth and performance across the network was adequate. “We were fairly familiar with the Mitel solution since we’d already rolled it out across a number of remote sites, so we knew what bandwidth was required. That was the key reason for going with Mitel ­ we wouldn’t have to check whether it would work,” said Honeywell.

Management of the Mitel IP telephony system is quite dispersed, but the main administration site is located at Oldham Civic Centre, while there are 60 Mitel 3300 IP Communications Platform (ICP) controllers managing voice traffic across all schools, libraries, social services sites, and other local authority buildings.

“Some of the larger schools have their own controllers ­ so they’re using them to manage their own telephony network on site. Some benefits from the rollout are that all the calls are routed back to the central site to take advantage of corporate telephony rates ­ and also free inter-organisation calls,” said Honeywell.

Savings and efficiencies
Honeywell said the project has led to significant savings. “One of the biggest challenges in the public sector at the moment is driving through efficiencies, and one of the largest potential savings is through economies of scale,” he added. Going forward, one of Unity’s key goals is to enable more flexible and remote working.

“We’re testing handsets running over people’s home broadband connections and we’re also trialling contact centre agents working from remote locations,” said Honeywell. “As a result of the rationalisation, we have people who are hot-desking, and they need to be able to seamlessly migrate from one office to another easily. An extension of the telephony system to their mobiles would be something we’d be very interested in.”

For Honeywell, the most satisfactory part of the project was that it became a collaborative venture with Bailey Teswaine, with the Unity Partnership almost matching the firm in the number of staff dedicated to completing the work.

“The stark choice was between signing an extension to the managed service, which was not particularly palatable, or throwing every effort we had behind the IP telephony migration,” he said.

Honeywell added that he was personally grateful that Bailey Teswaine stuck to its commitment. “I remember being sat in a meeting and all heads turned towards me when someone asked, ‘Can we do this?’. Looking at our partners, I said we could, and after that it was a case of my neck on the block.”