For South African national emergency medical care network, ER24, having a robust and reliable telephone exchange system is a non-negotiable.
The company, which is owned by Medi-Clinic Corporation, handles thousands of emergency phone calls every day. For callers being able to connect quickly enables the ER24 call centre to dispatch a vehicle to the emergency scene and save lives.
Far South Networks was approached by Activate Telecoms, a Johannesburg-based reseller of its products, to architect a solution for its client based on the Com.X SIP Gateway product.
ER24 wanted a system with voice connectivity that would function regardless of whether there was a network failure from their telecommunications provider.
The call centre operates in Sunninghill, Gauteng, and was running off two legacy PBXes. The first, an Avaya PBX supported 30 to 40 emergency call centre staff. The second, a Samsung 7400 supported 40 to 50 general office users.
Far South Networks proposed a simple and elegant solution. It consists of two Com.X2 SIP Gateway devices each with their own dedicated SIP interconnect to Activate Telecom and Telkom PRI connection.
A flexible, high availability interconnect between the existing PBXes and the available telecom and IP networks was ensured through the provision of load balancing and failover switch paths. Specifically, dynamic and multi-path traffic failover between each Activate Telecom (Neotel-based) SIP service and between each Telkom PRI line was provided.
The system design means that if SIP trunk congestion is encountered or Telkom trunks become unavailable, load balance and fail-over options will kick in and repeat until all options have been exhausted.
Far South Networks configured the system to specification and stress-tested the platform in-house, by successfully placing 82 000 calls over a 15 hour period, at a rate of 1.5 calls a second.
"The solution was well planned and the installation proved to be fairly straight forward," says David Lipton, MD of Activate Telecom. "It has resulted in a very stable resource for our call centre agents. Due to recent SIP network changes the system was rebooted for the first time in over 300 days."
Each Com.X2 can handle 120 simultaneous calls, providing ER24 with scalability, essential in any growing business. In addition each device has 500 000 minutes of voice recording time, removing the need for separate voice recording technology.
"For client-focused resellers like Activate Telecom, who have established excellent Com.X technical competency, Far South Networks is able to offer the client a flexible, high availability telecoms solution unmatched by anything on the local or international market today," says Grant Broomhall, MD of Far South Networks.
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