Case Study   Athlone Institute Gives Top Marks to 3Com® Networked Telephony   Organization: Athlone Institute of Technology (AIT) Location: Athlone, County Westmeath, Ireland Established: 1970 Students: 4000 Athlone Institute of Technology (AIT) provides an extensive range of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes to around 4000 students. The courses cover a variety of disciplines including the sciences, management and business studies, engineering and humanities. AIT's growing reputation as a centre of excellence has been a contributing factor in attracting many industries to the town. The Institute has also extended its reach to students outside its area with outreach centres in Cavan and Dublin, Ireland. The Challenge As demands on the communication systems grew, Pearse Murphy, IT manager at AIT, became increasingly aware of the limitations and excessive costs imposed by AIT's data and voice networks. AIT had been successfully running a Fast Ethernet network based on 3Com® Corebuilder® products for about three years. As the network passed the 1000-node mark, pressure on the available bandwidth threatened to become a problem. Murphy was also keen to introduce more resilience into the network given the number of nodes already being supported and the likelihood that network expansion. Murphy had for some time been concerned about the costs of maintaining AIT's legacy PBX, a traditional switch-based telephone system. In addition to the significant administrative overhead, the cost of 'adds, moves and changes' were becoming increasingly prohibitive. "We work with fairly limited resources in the ICT (Information Communications Technology) department, both in terms of people and budget. My aim was to find a communications solution which would be easy to manage – and therefore cut back on the staff time dedicated to day-to-day management and support. And we needed to reduce overheads and ongoing costs. With these aims in mind, my priority was to reduce the two cabling infrastructures down to one." The Solution After consulting with 3Com channel partner, Abacus Systems and Networks, Murphy decided upon a networked telephony solution based on: 3Com® NBX® 100 Communications System which gives AIT a fully integrated voice and data solution, offering all the functionality of the most advanced telephone systems. With the 3Com NBX 100 solution, AIT can deliver fully featured, high-quality voice services and data on a single LAN connection to more than 100 desktops. The Benefits With the NBX solution, AIT has a complete, high-speed communications infrastructure which is easily maintained without the costs and hassles associated with traditional telephony solutions. AIT now has the flexible and scalable network it needs to support future growth. The financial benefits of moving to a 3Com networked telephony solution were immediately obvious. "The cost of the NBX 100 system and Softphone site licence proved to be more economical than just adding 100 new extensions to the legacy system," said Murphy. The single, IP-based network infrastructure is extremely cost effective. In addition it is both robust and easy to administer. "We have already found that administrative costs are far lower compared to the previous systems," Murphy said. "Overall management takes less time, as the NBX 100 web interface is clear and easy to use. The amount of ICT Staff time expended on typical administrative activities, such as adding new staff to the network, has also been greatly reduced. As there is only one wiring point at each workstation, we can install PCs and phones at the same time. The same goes for 'adds, moves and changes' which are now simple and cheap as there's no need to reconfigure the system every time somebody changes desks." "We are an Institute of Technology renowned for the quality of our technology education. I believe it's essential that we live up to our reputation by being in the vanguard of new and emerging technologies," concluded Murphy. "We hope that further down the line other Irish colleges will link up with us making inter-college phone calls much cheaper. We plan to link 300 users at the next stage of development." 3Com, Corebuilder and NBX are registered trademarks and the 3Com logo is a trademark of 3Com Corporation. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.