Premier Universities In UK Taking Advantage of Virtual PBX

In Today’s era, any business small, medium or even big sized businesses can benefit greatly from a Virtual PBX system which makes direct communications simpler and affordable.

Recently, The University of Oxford selectedl’ a U.K. provider of managed voice and data services, for SIP trunking and virtual PBX capabilities across Janet, the private network for research and education.

SIP trunking provides true converged voice and data onto commo
IP connections, reducing or eliminating ISDN line rental charges. Only the calls availed have to be paid for which are evidently 90% cheaper than normal trunk calls.

Officials said that while the university's voice network was somewhat flexible, all the ISDN30 circuit fibers passed through the same small area of central Oxford. This was a great issue for the Oxford University Computing Service since if something went wrong with these circuit fibers, the entire staff and students at the university were not able to communicate or network within themselves.

Roy Farrow, divisional product director of the virtual PBX provider said in a statement, “SIP trunks offer a host of capabilities above and beyond their ISDN30 counterparts, such as allowing IP-based data services to use the same pipe as a voice service, enhanced disaster recovery features and the fantastic flexibility to scale up and down to meet peak demand.”

As a result, the University is now benefiting from increased stability, reduced carrier dependency, ample scalability and even cheaper call costs. Huge positive response has been received from the university staff & students.

Due to the potential downtime, Oxford University Computing Service felt the need to send voice traffic from its CISCO IP-virtual PBX infrastructure over its high bandwidth and physically disparate Janet IP network connections.

Alan Hillyer, head of telecoms, OUCS added, “Virtual PBX concept has provided us with an enterprise-class solution, while meeting a need that few of the greatly established carriers are turning their back on.”

From premise based PBX systems the business world has moved to hosted PBX systems. Shrugging off the drawbacks of premise based systems, hosted PBX technology allows integration of multi-location businesses. Unified communication is the main advantage of virtual PBX. Multiple locations of a single company can now communicate through a single channeling system. The main feature of Hosted private branch exchange is customer satisfaction. All its extended features such as greeting calls, DID, IVR, auto response etc are incorporated just to influence customer’s relationship with the enterprise. No more missed calls & missing of potential customers, it serves every customer in the best possible way. User friendliness of a service provided by an organization determines the customer’s interest in the enterprise.

In my opinion the university’s telecom department is quite heroic and entrepreneurial in recognizing that their existing ultra high bandwidth Janet connectivity and Janet's high capacity meant that the lack of QoS on Janet was irrelevant. The call quality is fabulous, probably better than standard ISDN30 quality. It's very stable and the university is really satisfied with it.