St Helens College Selects RAD’s TDMoIP to Deliver Voice and Data to Staff and Students

RAD Data Communications’ IPmux TDM over IP (TDMoIP) gateway has been selected by St Helens College, one of the ten largest colleges in the UK, based in the North of England. The IPmux will provide high quality converged voice and data services to the college’s three main sites, which house around 500 handsets and are used by between 13,000 and 20,000 students at any one time.

The college had recently upgraded its network backbone to Gigabit Ethernet, and was faced with the dilemma of how to deliver voice services most cost-effectively. After extensively researching a number of Voice over IP (VoIP) solutions available, which the college found to be very expensive, they were surprised to find an alternative and cost-effective method from RAD.

“RAD’s IPmux provided a simple point-to-point solution that was priced very competitively, especially compared to VoIP solutions,” said Paul Fitzgibbon, Communications and Development Officer for St Helens College’s Procurement and Technical Services Department. “The safety of students is paramount and emergency calls sometimes need to be made, so reliability was a crucial factor in our decision. We were also pleased to find a solution that was very quick and easy to install, as well as capable of managing itself once installed.”

RAD’s innovative TDMoIP solution allows circuit extension over IP networks, enabling voice, video and data traffic to be carried transparently over high bandwidth networks, such as Gigabit Ethernet, IP and MPLS. This allows St Helens College to use its Gigabit Ethernet backbone for telephony applications with the same level of quality, reliability and functionality currently provided by TDM voice networks, and without the need to replace TDM voice switches. The system was installed by GFI, an authorized RAD distributor in the UK.

“A lot of people are simply not aware that there exists a cost-effective and reliable alternative to Voice over IP,“ says Grant Notman, UK General Manager, RAD Data Communications. “The IPmux is very quick and simple to provision, and provides a return on investment in less than twelve months.”