A Large School District Moves from Cisco to PBXact—Saving Hundreds of Thousands

The Customer

A Washington school district consisting of 6 public schools, including four elementary schools, one middle school and one high school. The district has nine buildings in total: one for each school and separate buildings for their facilities, buses and administrative offices.

A Washington school district consisting of 6 public schools, including four elementary schools, one middle school and one high school. The district has nine buildings in total: one for each school and separate buildings for their facilities, buses and administrative offices.

To manage communications across all sites, a Cisco Call Manager phone system was hosted in the administrative building, handling calls to and from each building via dedicated fiber lines. PRI lines were connected to the Call Manager for inbound and outbound external calls. Cisco phones were deployed throughout the district for use by staff and teachers. On a typical day, the school district handles a high volume of calls between teachers, maintenance staff and parents.

Business Challenges

When the school district began building a new elementary school, it knew this would place a burden on its current phone system. In addition, Cisco had recently discontinued the Call Manager phone system, along with its support and maintenance. This put the district in a difficult position, as it could no longer rely on Cisco for future support or product needs. It had to choose between continuing operations by moving to Cisco’s UC phone solution (which would have brought license migration challenges and ongoing SmartNet costs) or finding an alternative product from another vendor.

If it had opted for Cisco’s UC solution, it would also have had to replace all its phones in every building with updated versions, as they would no longer be compatible. In total, the cost would have exceeded $350,000 to remain with a complete Cisco solution.

Sangoma Solutions

Because of the high cost of staying with Cisco, the school district began looking for alternative phone solutions. It considered companies such as Mitel as well as hosted services from providers such as Spectrum (Charter). Open-source solutions such as Asterisk and FreePBX from Sangoma were also evaluated and tested based on feedback from other Washington districts. The district initially chose FreePBX. However, after further consideration, it began looking at PBXact, Sangoma’s turnkey business phone system. PBXact is a UC phone solution available for on-premises and cloud deployments, and it comes with advanced UC features in a single, ready-to-use package with no license restrictions. It also includes auto-provisioning with Sangoma’s range of IP phones, equipped with advanced features and PhoneApps, which control the phone display with unique productivity applications. Support available for PBXact was the district’s most important criterion.

The school district also appreciated Sangoma’s Vega VoIP gateways, the most resilient gateways on the market. A unique feature allows any IP phone registered behind the gateway to continue working if the upstream Internet link goes down, allowing users to call one another and place outbound calls if an analog line is connected. The district could install a gateway at each building to keep IP phones operational and connect them to analog lines when PSTN emergency calls were needed. The district calculated the total cost of the Sangoma solution, including the PBXact UC system, IP phones and Vega gateways, and arrived at a total of $67,000. This was significantly less than the $350,000 for the Cisco solution. It chose Sangoma not only for the lower price, but also because the solution offered better overall value.

Results

The district installed two PBXact systems in the administrative building in high-availability mode for survivability. A single Vega gateway was installed at each school site and connected to the upstream fiber links. Various Sangoma IP phone models were deployed at each location and registered through the Vega gateways to the PBXact system at the main office. Local PSTN analog lines were connected to each Vega gateway for failover if the upstream fiber connection went down. The district is very satisfied with Sangoma’s solution. It is particularly pleased that each Vega gateway can support up to 120 IP phones for emergency failover and long-loop (analog) operation, allowing them to be installed in the typical IT closet far from the fax machine location.

The district installed two PBXact systems in the administrative building in high-availability mode for survivability. A single Vega gateway was installed at each school site and connected to the upstream fiber links. Various Sangoma IP phone models were deployed at each location and registered through the Vega gateways to the PBXact system at the main office. Local PSTN analog lines were connected to each Vega gateway for failover if the upstream fiber connection went down. The district is very satisfied with Sangoma’s solution. It is particularly pleased that each Vega gateway can support up to 120 IP phones for emergency failover and long-loop (analog) operation, allowing them to be installed in the typical IT closet far from the fax machine location.

PBXact was very easy to configure, and the IP phones proved very useful thanks to the PhoneApps features, which staff use daily. One feature appreciated by teachers is hot desking, ideal for itinerant teachers so they can take their phone settings with them when they log in to another phone. By getting to know the customer, Sangoma was able to implement a secure telecommunications solution that met the customer’s needs and offered the best value.