Communication services for the previous events were mostly provided by BT over traditional networks. The process of service installation was time consuming due to the inflexibility of the PSTN. This year was different with the installation of SIP trunks to carry 100% of both inbound and outbound call traffic.
The brief was to provide telecommunications services over SIP trunks for the duration of the event to exhibitors, journalists, guests and competitors.
The solution was to provide suitable IP connectivity, sufficient in size to cope with the demand in bandwidth not just for voice traffic, but also for data as there was to be live IP broadcasts to the USA. The connectivity was provided by BT Net, installing a 34Mb host link to site.
Specialist UK SIP trunk provider - VoIP Unlimited, provided 600 geographic VoIP DDIs with a local Turnberry area code. These DDIs were issued to the various exhibitors and vendors two weeks prior to the event starting so they could publish their supporting literature in time.
Steve Bieniek, VoIP Unlimited's Sales Director says, "We could deliver the 600 geographic DDIs pretty much instantaneously using our SIP Trunk automated provisioning system. This significantly reduced the engineering planning that would have been needed with BT on PSTN networks with multiple ISDN 30 circuits.
The way that the traditional networks were deployed in previous years events meant that calls between DDIs were chargeable. By deploying IP across the site, inter-event calls were totally free of call charges, saving the R&A significant cost savings on calls and removing the headache of onward charging of call costs to their exhibitors.
Jason Hall from main communications contractor Envision Media stated, "Deploying communications for previous events had not been easy for a number of years. BT had disbanded their special events department, meaning there was no communications between BT Retail, Wholesale and Openreach. There were billing issues and engineers turned up randomly to install services required weeks, sometimes months before.
By deploying SIP trunks we had no issues in managing the "engineering" element of the solution.”
Envision deployed a Cisco Call Manager on site with over 394 Cisco IP handsets for the various parties.
Hall continues, “Call quality was excellent, delivering service to the hundreds of users on site.”
VoIP Unlimited utilised its relationships with Tier 1 carriers offering quality Gold routes for call transit to hundreds of international destinations.
Good call quality was vital to the whole solution, providing confidence to the R&A that the technology was at the level required to sustain reliable communications.