- How It's Done

How Daniels, McKenna and Walker Co
'Revolutionized' their Phones.

John Daniels and his partners agreed that their engineering consulting business would gain a competitive edge from a new telephone setup (assuming they could afford it). They were aware that the system they had made them look small and under-equipped (they couldn't afford not to upgrade).

Everyone was delighted with the solution IT handyman Bill Weller delivered because it solved problems they didn't even know they had for a price their small business budget could bear. They would continue to save by dramatically reducing their long distance expenses.

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The Pipeline

Weller had already introduced his customers to a superior bandwidth provider (business class DSL with more balanced download and upload speeds). Now he called in another ally: an Internet Telephony Service Provider (ITSP) that offered voice access to the Internet by way of the popular Session Initiation Protocol (SIP).

Weller had chosen the ITSP based on their customer support and the fact that they were a business-only supplier and would facilitate the transfer of existing telephone numbers. They also offered failover redundancy options and provided advanced security features.

The Hardware

Weller installed an Epygi Quadro 2X in the Florida office that served as an IP router for voice and data and even included a firewall. He showed John Daniels how to install another 2X at his home and shipped another to John Walker in Indianapolis. All Quadros accepted analog phones the engineers already owned.

Next he used a PC plugged into the office 2X to program extensions, voicemail, auto attendant and a dozen other requested features. Quadro's Call Manager graphical user interface offered wizards to make the job fast and accurate.

All extensions were programmed to signal incoming calls (unless muted) with different ring sounds for internal and external callers. Now, from her home, Sherry Daniels could professionally answer and then transfer calls to four digit extensions-even to Indianapolis-as though everyone were in the same building.

The company was able to drop two of their business telephone lines and kept only one for emergency use. It did double duty as the designated fax line.

For the monthly price of the ITSP, the company made unlimited calls throughout the US and Canada (no long distance charges). It wasn't long before they could cut the cost of their international calls by more than 70% using a Quadro Gateway in India.

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