British Gymnastics

The call management solution had to allow them to connect their remote offices and home workers while considerably reducing call costs.

Based at the Lilleshall National Sports Centre in Shropshire, British Gymnastics works from three separate buildings with a total of 80 staff of which 20 work from home or remote offices. Considering the vast advantages of Internet telephony, British Gymnastics decided to make use of its broadband connection to create a robust VoIP environment.

British Gymnastics had an Avaya PBX system in place. Three years after its original implementation, the system reached its end-of-life. They did not want to upgrade the system with its current replacement product and wanted instead to opt for a feature-rich platform which adopted open standards technology.

British Gymnastics explored the possibilities of a VoIP solution, primarily because they had a number of remote offices that could easily be linked using voice over IP on their existing broadband connection and the considerable potential for cost savings on inter-office calls. The system also needed to be scalable and interoperable with other vendors’ equipment. Overall, they required high reliability and flexibility.

Their foremost concern was, if their existing LAN infrastructure would cope with the additional VoIP traffic. They were also concerned if QoS (Quality of Service) would be an issue, both on the LAN and WAN.

With prior experience of using an Asterisk PBX, British Gymnastics chose to go with an Asterisk-based VoIP solution due to its overwhelming advantages over a proprietary hardware-based VoIP PBX.

British Gymnastics chose Telappliant as its Internet telephony solutions vendor having had previous experience trialing its VoIPtalk service and utilising its superior technical support services.

Customer Comment

There are numerous advantages of opting for an open source Asterisk solution. These include the ability to run on standard server hardware and provide easy integration points with our existing systems and applications. Asterisk has a global support community which means that my team has access to an extensive existing knowledge base. Furthermore there are no ongoing software licensing costs and adding features and fixing bugs is simply a software upgrade. An advantage of a software-based PBX is that we can now run a test/development server with identical configuration, to test any required changes before applying them to the live system, for just the hardware cost of a spare PC.

Despite the initial challenges with the implementation, the technical team at Telappliant were very helpful and responded very quickly to get all the issues resolved to ensure that we had a reliable, solid PBX platform.