Tim Ormrod, IT Manager at Barrons, explains. “Barrons is a family company that has sold caravans and motorhomes for over 50 years. We employ about 350 people across sales sites in Durham, Yorkshire, Cumbria, Lancashire, Cheshire, north Wales and Kent,” he says, “And we even have a branch office in New Zealand. Communication between all these locations was becoming unmanageable and costly, I needed to find a solution that would allow us to cut telecommunications costs by a substantial amount and control everything from one location.”

Barrons needed data and voice connectivity throughout their business. Currently, all of Barrons’ sites across the UK are connected via VPNs. The main method of communications between staff as they wander around the large sites is cell phones that are part of a limited user group, restricting calls to other employees only. Even so, costs were rising and Barrons felt they were paying high maintenance charges on their legacy PABX systems

The main requisite was to link all their sites into one phone system with Voice over IP (VoIP), reduce internal and external call charges, and eliminate the high maintenance charges. Tim was an early adopter of Voice over Wi-Fi, and knew the savings that this approach could bring. He decided on a standards-based SIP PABX with an ISDN gateway to connect to their existing PABX system. He has also taken advantage of Nokia E series handsets that support both Wi-Fi and SIP clients.

To support the Wi-Fi VoIP application Tim identified that he needed a LAN Switch that provided PoE to power the wireless access points and also a wireless switch to provide seamless roaming connectivity between the access points. Staff needed to be able to walk around the site with their SIP-based phones without loss of contact, so the selection criteria were based on the ability to pass calls between access points, and the range of coverage around each access point. Tim evaluated several systems from Cisco, Aruba and Extracom before discovering the 3Com Unified Gigabit Switch, which outperformed all of its competitors. “The 3Com® Unified Switch enabled seamless roaming with no dropping between access points,” he says. “The Aruba system, for example, either dropped calls or took over 2 seconds to pass a call from one access point to another.” 

The 3Com access points also had by far the greatest range. “I was amazed by the excellent range of the 3Com access points,” says Tim Ormrod. “It means we can cover a 7-acre site with just one 3Com 24-port Unified Gigabit Switch. I was worried that there wouldn’t be enough LAN ports available as some vendors’ switches require the access points to be directly connected to the switch, but with the 3Com Unified Switch this is not the case. They can be connected via intermediate switches.”

The 3Com Unified Gigabit Wireless PoE 24 layer 2 switch combines the features of a traditional LAN switch with a centralized wireless controller. The 24 built-in copper 10/100/1000 ports support 24 wireless access points. Line-rate wired switching with full power 802.3af PoE is supplied to all 24 ports providing power to access points, VoIP phones and IP cameras. 

For security, the Barrons system uses WEP encryption and MAC address filtering to ensure only valid users access the system.

Tim Ormrod enumerates the benefits that using the 3Com Unified Switch has brought to the business. “It’s easy to work out the sums,” he says. “A 3Com Unified Switch cost me about £900 plus £140 per access point compared with £2,500 for a competitive product with less performance, and £220 per access point.  Not only does it save costs on internal telecommunications; we can make international calls between the UK and New Zealand at extremely low costs via the infrastructure. Overall, we are looking at a 20-30% drop in telecommunications costs. And calls between our Nokia phones are free. The payback period for this solution is less than 12 months - which makes it very easy for me to justify to my Finance Manager.”