Trans World Radio Saves Thousands with Sangoma’s FreePBX Solution

The Customer

TWR (Trans World Radio) is the world’s largest international Christian missionary media ministry, broadcasting its message in 230 languages and dialects. Its seven data centers support operations and partnerships in more than 160 countries, including regional offices in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, as well as broadcast sites in the Netherlands Antilles, Guam, Benin, and Swaziland. In 2010, the organization decided to switch to an Asterisk IP PBX telephone system. A key step in this successful transition was adopting FreePBX for administration and programming.

Business Challenges

As a global organization, rising telephone communication costs were a constant concern for TWR. “When we wanted to call South Africa, we paid standard international call charges using conventional commercial trunking,” explains Cassius C. Smith, senior project consultant for TWR. “Each office still had its own providers for local dial tones.” When Smith joined TWR in 2010, two sites were using VoIP services for internal use only. The legacy Cisco Call Manager system cost about 8 000 $ per year to maintain. “There was no trunking; nothing to connect the systems between the two sites,” he explains. Smith and his team decided to try migrating to the open source Asterisk platform using the IP phones already in place. At the same time, TWR was upgrading its Microsoft Exchange server, which would have required a major upgrade to Cisco Call Manager. “There were all sorts of customizations to make it work,” says Smith. “That gave us even more motivation to change our systems.” The first Asterisk conversion took place at the Americas regional office in North Carolina. “We scheduled a weekend for the transition,” Smith says. “We were finished by 9 p.m. on Friday. ” The subsequent conversions took place at two regional offices that were changing buildings and needed new telephone systems. “Within two months, we had three installations running on Asterisk in Guam, Vienna, and Singapore,” Smith explains. “This enabled us to use four-digit dialing between these sites.” Subsequent installations included the Netherlands, South Africa, Swaziland, Bonaire (Netherlands Antilles), and Eastern Europe. “All TWR regional offices and transmission sites, except one with a poor Internet connection, now run on Asterisk,” Smith explains. As the conversion expanded, Smith found it increasingly difficult to manage systems across multiple time zones and locations. “I almost never took leave because there was always something going on,” Smith says. “The Linux command-line interface used to manage the systems is a challenge for junior Windows IT staff. In many regions, we have limited staff, and those who are there wear many hats.”

Sangoma Solutions

Smith realized he needed an intuitive web graphical interface that junior support staff could easily use during deployment and programming. “I knew I needed a GUI solution to get help from junior IT staff and overcome my time zone challenge,” says Smith. “We started looking at Sangoma FreePBX on a vendor’s recommendation. I realized it was a very powerful tool that would make provisioning and managing phone systems much simpler.” FreePBX is a PBX ecosystem that offers Asterisk functionality and much more, he adds. “It lets you use a GUI for almost all administrative functions, including intrusion detection, user access to voicemail boxes, recordings and greetings, and much, much more.” The first FreePBX installation took place at TWR’s site in Eastern Europe. “I can now configure time conditions for each office with one click and delegate maintenance tasks,” Smith explains. “Our staff in remote locations really appreciate web access because it lets them program the systems themselves.”

The Results

With Asterisk and FreePBX, Smith can manage phone systems around the world from a central location. The best thing about having the system in place is that Smith can now easily respond to feature requests. “Whenever users come to ask whether something can be done with the phone system, I can almost always say, ‘Yes, of course.’ I can make the system do what they want. There are practically no limitations.” The overall return on investment has been impressive. The complete deployment cost about 49 000 $ for a total of 442 endpoints, all of which can now connect with a four-digit call. “Being able to do this for 100 $ per endpoint is phenomenally cost-effective for an enterprise-class phone system, especially when you consider that a typical endpoint costs between 1 200 $ and 1 500 $ per seat, plus maintenance,” says Smith. In addition, the company saves between 3 000 $ and 6 000 $ per month on international calls, based on an average of 3 000 to 4 000 minutes per month. “Combining FreePBX software with phone provisioning makes everything very manageable,” says Smith. “Other than that, it just works! FreePBX has been a lifesaver. I’m a big fan.”