WarwickShire County Council Switch to VoIP to Reduce Cost.

In other to cut costs, warwickshire county council is switching to voip at its 450 sites. The technology is currently been tested by 50 users at shire Hall in Warwick and next more 15,000 extensions will be added across the county.
Mark woodward, an IT communication engineer says the main gain of the project will be the ease of roll out, maintenance and flexibility of office moves. He further stated that flexibility is an unquantifiable gain to put to management, but they shall save many, man hours, and that makes warwickshire more productive. The IP system have 80,000 users across the network plus 250 schools, 40 libraries, transport depots and 100 social services offices. Mark woodward continued, saying Warwickshire county council main challenges are cost of implementation, reliability and cultural issues associated with helping the customers to adjust to new technology. He said “we brought out the system to non- technical staff and its the slowest links on the network to prove that it works.
Warwickshire, which avoided having to lease expensive BT lines, as a procure to full voip implementation, they started running telephone lines over IP trunking. Using voip, you save 50% on annual phone line rental, and woodward said they have already done it in a few places and they saved 1,800 pounds per annual on just a single link.
The council voip technology is supplied by lucent Alcatel. IDC senior analyst Rogier Mol, says voip adoption by smaller councils is unlikely and larger county councils are mostly open to the additional functionality that voip can offer them, especially over multiple locations.