Nortel Networks Remote Office connects virtual workers with VOIP

Nortel Networks has announced the availability of Remote Office 9110 and Remote Office 9115, which will allow home-based remote workers to have the same telephone sets, features and services as they would have working in the office.

Companies are looking at using remote office solutions to lower costs through leased-line expenses and to use remote access as a recruitment and retention tool at a time when working from home is an increasingly attractive alternative.

According to the International Teleworkers Association and Council, there were 28 million workers operating away from the office in 2001. Employee benefits include flexible work schedules and the elimination of commuting, while employers benefit from increased employee satisfaction, productivity and savings in real estate. Remote Office is part of Nortel Networks strategy to deliver voice-over-IP (VOIP) solutions to companies regardless of worker locations headquarters, branch or home offices while maintaining voice quality and reliability.

"Companies are looking for ways to cost-effectively tie together teleworkers with all the technology available at the corporate headquarters," said Joe Gagan, senior analyst, the Yankee Group. "The catch is that it has previously been extremely expensive to enable teleworkers to gain the same feature set of the phone system at the office. Solutions such as the Remote Office are exactly what businesses are looking to implement."

Remote Office 9110 and 9115 are designed to extend the features and functionality of Nortel Networks Meridian PBX and Succession IP-PBX to remote workers via VOIP, providing a cost-effective, resilient solution for telecommuters, call centre agents, after hours/on call support personnel and small or home-based offices. Remote Office 9110 supports a full range of Meridian 2000 digital series telephones, while Remote Office 9115 also supports the Meridian Digital 3900 series portfolio. Both solutions are based on IP technology, making them flexible enough to support a variety of broadband access methods as well as traditional analogue lines.

Remote Office offers a unique Quality of Service transitioning feature that allows the voice quality of a live call to be maintained by dynamically transferring the VOIP connection to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) in the event IP network performance degrades. This feature is transparent to the user, offering a high level of voice quality and reliability.

"Our VOIP Remote Office solution allows our customers to offer more flexibility to their employees, giving them a greater pool of resources, such as work-at-home parents, or people who live too far away from the office to commute daily," said Alex Pierson, voice and VOIP general manager, Nortel Networks. "For workers who travel to other branch offices or occasionally work from home, Remote Office allows them to use the same office phones in all locations, eliminating the need to remember different features and codes for multiple locations.

"Remote Office brings the death of distance for our enterprise customers, making the minimum size for an enterprise location one - an employee working in a home office," Pierson said.

Remote Office can operate with Nortel Networks Contivity family of security products, providing a high level of security for the customers network. The Contivity portfolio supports firewall services, authentication of endpoints over IP, and end-to-end encryption of VOIP packets via IPSec as they travel across the public Internet.