Maryland County Saves Money with Transition from ATM to IP/MPLS Network

As with most local governments, saving money is a major priority for this large Maryland County. One of the cost saving targets was to reduce the annual telecommunications expense by one-million dollars; achievable by migrating from their current ATM network to an Ethernet / MPLS network.

To keep both capital and operational costs low, it was decided to utilize the existing PBX equipment and not acquire Voice over IP (VoIP) gear with its associated training, procedural, and performance changes. Fortunately, some of the PBX branch extenders already supported IP transport capabilities. However, enabling IP transport on the remaining extenders was cost prohibitive, so the County looked into more effective alternatives and found the Engage Communication IP•Tube to be a perfect fit.

The IP•Tube product family is used by governments, enterprises, service providers and the military to convert legacy T1/E1, T3/E3 and serial circuits to packets. It is a proven technology with key features to ensure effective and efficient transport of circuits over IP packet based networks. For the County, the following IP•Tube capabilities were critical:

• Canceling echo introduced by the IP network to ensure voice quality was not impacted by the migration from ATM to Ethernet / MPLS;
• Both a multi-slot, redundant power chassis for the central site and compact one rack unit appliance for the remote site;
• Availability of different quantities of WAN ports to optimize initial cost, with the flexibility to upgrade to more ports in the future via software;
• Dual LAN ports, with one port dedicated to payload traffic and the other for management.

The IP•Tube product family delivers high quality performance even in challenging network environments with assured packet delivery. It also support a wide variety of feature options including automatic switching to a secondary IP path should the primary fail, load balancing onto multiple LAN circuits, and compressing data for more efficient IP network utilization.

By deploying the Engage Communication IP•Tube, the County achieved a return on investment (ROI) in less than 9 months.