The Customer
With six sites across the Mid-Atlantic region and Pennsylvania, this car dealership was operating a healthy business. However, it also realized it was missing an opportunity to significantly reduce operating expenses by using SIP trunks. The heavy use of leased telephone lines to connect branch offices to headquarters resulted in a substantial monthly phone bill. The dealership had heard that it could reduce operating expenses by using VoIP, but needed help effectively implementing a solution across all its sites. It turned to BlueCloud Consultants for help with this project.
With six sites across the Mid-Atlantic region and Pennsylvania, this car dealership was operating a healthy business. However, it also realized it was missing an opportunity to significantly reduce operating expenses by using SIP trunks. The heavy use of leased telephone lines to connect branch offices to headquarters resulted in a substantial monthly phone bill. The dealership had heard that it could reduce operating expenses by using VoIP, but needed help effectively implementing a solution across all its sites. It turned to BlueCloud Consultants for help with this project.
Business Challenges
The basic SIP trunk service is reliable, but connecting SIP trunks to a PBX is not always straightforward. At the heart of this dealership’s phone system is a fully redundant pair of IP PBXs that provides voice routing and extended telephony features to all its branches, including a complete unified communications deployment. Located at the headquarters, the high-availability IP PBX pair has redundant Internet connections via cable, DSL, and wireless 4G. This IP PBX core supports 280 extensions across all six sites. The high-availability IP PBXs use an extensive set of SIP messages to manage a rich range of calling features, but the available SIP trunks provided only a very basic set of SIP messages for call setup and teardown. This interoperability gap between the IP PBX pair and the SIP trunks prevented reliable VoIP service delivery. When a SIP trunk received a command it did not understand, it dropped the call. It was essential to have an SBC that could recognize which SIP commands to pass through to the SIP trunk, which to handle internally, and which to ignore.
Sangoma Solutions
BlueCloud Consulting knew that SIP interoperability issues could be resolved with a Session Border Controller (SBC). However, they tested SBCs from several manufacturers and did not find one that properly handled the interoperability issues between the client’s high-availability IP PBXs and the SIP trunks of the selected Internet Telephony Service Provider (ITSP). BlueCloud Consulting then tested a Sangoma SBC with the dealership’s high-availability IP PBX cluster. The Sangoma SBC correctly handled all SIP messages, passing call setup and teardown messages to the SIP trunk while handling reference messages internally without sending them to the SIP trunk. This enabled the IP PBXs to operate correctly and prevented the SIP trunk from dropping calls.
BlueCloud Consulting knew that SIP interoperability issues could be resolved with a Session Border Controller (SBC). However, they tested SBCs from several manufacturers and did not find one that properly handled the interoperability issues between the client’s high-availability IP PBXs and the SIP trunks of the selected Internet Telephony Service Provider (ITSP). BlueCloud Consulting then tested a Sangoma SBC with the dealership’s high-availability IP PBX cluster. The Sangoma SBC correctly handled all SIP messages, passing call setup and teardown messages to the SIP trunk while handling reference messages internally without sending them to the SIP trunk. This enabled the IP PBXs to operate correctly and prevented the SIP trunk from dropping calls.
The Results
BlueCloud Consultants found that using regular expressions in the Sangoma SBC to define the call plan made it easier to develop processing rules compared with the complicated approach required by many other SBCs. The sophisticated debugging tools available on the Sangoma SBC also made deploying the solution much simpler. BlueCloud Consultants achieved great success using Sangoma SBCs to provide a fully operational and reliable VoIP solution in a scenario with a sophisticated, high-availability IP PBX cluster that offered a complete unified communications deployment and served numerous branches. By deploying Sangoma SBCs at the client’s premises, BlueCloud Consultants was able to save this VoIP project, which the dealership might otherwise have abandoned. By switching from conventional telephone lines to VoIP, the dealership saves approximately 350 000 $ per year.
BlueCloud Consultants found that using regular expressions in the Sangoma SBC to define the call plan made it easier to develop processing rules compared with the complicated approach required by many other SBCs. The sophisticated debugging tools available on the Sangoma SBC also made deploying the solution much simpler. BlueCloud Consultants achieved great success using Sangoma SBCs to provide a fully operational and reliable VoIP solution in a scenario with a sophisticated, high-availability IP PBX cluster that offered a complete unified communications deployment and served numerous branches. By deploying Sangoma SBCs at the client’s premises, BlueCloud Consultants was able to save this VoIP project, which the dealership might otherwise have abandoned. By switching from conventional telephone lines to VoIP, the dealership saves approximately 350 000 $ per year.