Wednesday, May 25, 2009

I am happy to announce that the Borton Petrini Law Offices are operating well on the new Allworx IP PBX.  The offices are linked using the Telepacific One Net IP VPN product.  This is a managed MPLS that has allowed the customer to run VoIP and Data across the same network.  We have a 3.0 Mb Smart Voice Integrated PRI in the main office that feeds 4 other offices with dial tone and Internet.  There is a redundant location in the San Bernardino office that has a similar design.

Since the installation of the last office was completed we have upgraded the San Bernardino office’s MPLS connection to a 3.0 Mb as well.  This gives us true physical rout diversity to all offices.  With the Telepacific network we can build some failover capability when using two T-1’s bonded together.  If one of the T-1’s go down Telepacific will load balance on the other one.  We also implemented Network Redundancy on the voice side where if the Voice PRI in Bakersfield goes down all inbound calls are rerouted by Telepacific to the San Bernardino office and visa-versa.

Some issues like outbound caller ID have come up that were not anticipated in the original design.  Since calls from some offices are routed across the MPLS network and out the PRI in the main office the caller ID that shows to the person you are calling is only the local number of the main office.  This can not be changed by the Allworx system at this time though they are working on the Advanced Multi Site upgrade for version 7.0 which should be out by the end of the year.  For now we resolved the problem by having the system show a caller ID number that if called will point at an ACD message giving out the names of each office and an option to the caller to press a number to be transfered to that office.

Article Written by Dan Baldwin of the Telecom Agents Association TAA.  Dan was associated with this project as an outside consultant for ATEL Communications.
http://www.telecomassociation.com