Taking just 18 months from the start of construction to the first commercial flight the airport stands on a 300 Hectare site and features a 2.87km runway capable of handling Boeing 747s, state-of-the-art 8,000m2 terminal facility and is the primary tenant of the 800 Hectare Wellcamp Business Park. A second planned phase for the terminal facility will increase the floor space by a further 4,500m2 when initial passenger numbers increase.
It was wholly appropriate that Quantas, Australia’s longest-serving airline, operated the inaugural flight of the airport’s first regular passenger service on the 17th November, 2014 under its QantasLink service.
When it came to selecting a Unified Communications system for the airport, Wagners’ starting point was the vendor they had previously worked with – Siemens. Mark Bizzell IT Manager at Wagner explains, “Our primary requirement was to provide a single unified telephony platform that spanned both the airport and business park. In particular we wanted to be in a position where we could make it easy to provide the business park tenants with the option of acquiring their telephony services directly through us. We did take a look at the latest equipment from Siemens, however, we eventually chose SpliceCom because it was a modern system that ticked all of the boxes for us. In addition we knew that four other airports in Queensland utilise SpliceCom, which gave us confidence that the experience they have already gained in our particular industry would be of significant benefit to the business.”
Wagners have initially installed a 500-user hybrid system, comprising of a 5100 Hard PBX and S8050 Soft PBX. Both run SpliceCom’s core Maximiser operating system and are networked together to provide a single fully resilient system, with each IP PBX capable of running as a 500-user standalone system. The Hard PBX is located in the terminal building, whilst the Soft PBX will host the plots on the Business Park, with the latter IP PBX running as a native Linux app on a Dell server and offering the benefit of being easily upgraded to support 1,000+ users through a simple licence key change when required in the future. Wagners are also running the historical analysis and reports module of SpliceCom’s Vision Business Management Suite on the same Linux platform. Again, this solution can be seamlessly expanded through the addition of call recording and real-time wallboards or dashboards should the need arise. Finally, the initial rollout to the airport buildings has seen the installation of fifty of SpliceCom’s PCS 542 IP phones and utilises IP trunks from NetSIP.
“The great beauty of the SpliceCom system is that it can grow and expand, both in capacity and the applications it delivers, in line with the demands placed on it by our business growth, without the need to replace equipment when doing so. We can even run the Soft PBX and Vision Business Management in a virtual environment should the need arise in the future. There is the second phase of the terminal building and 300 allotments in the Business Park to be developed over the next ten years or so. We’re planning for great growth over this time period and the SpliceCom system is an integral part of our plans,” concluded Bizzell.