Televerde  

Overview of Solution

"To overview our Qwest services, we do about half a million minutes a month, and we do that at six locations, [our] corporate office and five call center locations. We do the Qwest outbound long distance along with some inbound toll-free service—so that really overviews kind of the Qwest voice services that we use.

Our call centers are located in a women's prison facility, so we are located across five yards at a women's prison, and then we use fiber connections to backhaul all of that to a single location that's at the prison facility, and then we use Qwest Metro Ethernet to put that all on a single network with our data facility and our corporate office.

And the interesting thing about that is there's obviously a lot of security that has to go up around the women's prison, and it can be a real pain to get anybody to come in there and do the install—and that was actually another really great thing about Qwest was they worked directly with the prison facility and with us to get all of the clearances—because there's background checks that had to happen and all of that stuff—so that they could actually come in and even do the install.

So even to get services installed was quite difficult and Qwest did it without any problem. We also use Qwest's online QControl service, and we really love that because now we get access into live usage statistics.

We know what we're using, but we also now can verify what Qwest is seeing and verify that those two are correct, and we can use that for any potential sources of fraud, whether people are using our system inappropriately or Qwest's system, somehow using that connection inappropriately."

Why Qwest

"The most significant reasons we chose Qwest were because we already had some substantial infrastructure with Qwest.

We have Qwest Metro [Optical] Ethernet. We already had Qwest Internet, so we knew that we already had experience with the Internet and good reliability there, and we knew that the IP path that the voice packets were going to take to get to Qwest were obviously going to be really short.

We're already on Qwest's network, so we don't have to worry about a problem with an Internet router in San Jose getting in the way with our voice communications going to our provider in Nevada. So that was really important.

One of the other reasons we chose Qwest was because of the quality. We knew that the voice quality was going to be far superior because of the short routes and the control that we had and Qwest had.

And then one of the other major reasons we chose Qwest was they allowed us to try it for free, so we had a chance to test it out and we were confident and assured that it was going to work, it was going to work well—and then not only that, it was not expensive. "

Measurable Benefits

Well, some of the measurable benefits we've seen are—the most obvious is we're saving a little over 100,000 dollars a year.

We also went from three service providers through a telecom broker and a very complicated arrangement down to one single provider, and by doing that--by switching to all voice over IP and being able to eliminate the specialized equipment for those TDM, T1 connections, we've eliminated about 35,000 dollars in hardware costs.

Given that we had to spend no resources in actually switching to Qwest and that we already had all of the equipment, we really experienced an immediate ROI. The second we switched over, we'd really recouped pretty much all the costs in doing the switch.

Some of the other measurable benefits would be a reduc[tion] in the complexity of our environment, so now we have—my workload has gone down dramatically, so I spend about 25 percent less time—cumulative, total time—probably 50 percent less time just watching equipment and watching for failures, and I get to really now focus on system improvements whereas before I would be kind of working on monitoring maintenance, now I get to work on some of the improvements to our system and enhancements.

Non-financial Benefits

"So a nice thing about Q.Control is we take the records from our phone system, we take the records from Qwest, we compare the two, and we will instantaneously know if and when our system has been compromised, and so that's really important to us. That's not something I expect to happen, but we will now know immediately if that ever happens.

Some of the other benefits from--that we've realized by switching to Qwest was the 75 percent reduction in equipment that we had.

That is really a key for us. We are very focused on uptime quality, and overly complex systems are prone to breakage, downtime—whatever.

And some of that's a little bit intangible, but that has been a real plus for us.

By reducing our equipment by 75 percent, what that means is where we had 10 phone systems—10 servers and media gateways before, we now have 2. We have the 2 call center phone systems, and those 2 systems talk directly to Qwest.

We don't do media translation anymore, so we don't convert voice over IP from our agents' desk to T1s, so we have no specialized hardware anymore, and that's really key for us. We don't have any TDM hardware in our environment anymore, so we just take voice over IP from our agents' stations and hand that directly over to Qwest. No transcoding, no nothing.

Some of the other benefits that we've seen are an increase in audio quality. We have fewer points where we're converting audio from digital to analog, back to digital again, so our audio quality has gone way up.

And not only that—now we can monitor it from one point all the way through our system to where we hand it off to Qwest.

The other benefit that we've seen has been an increase in our uptime and reliability.

We have fewer points of failure now and we don't have any specialized hardware, so if one component fails, there isn't a big rush to try to find a specialized part or to have three spares on site just to replace a part that's difficult to get.

We use off-the-shelf, very available hardware, so if we have any sort of failure, they're very easy to resolve and it's easy to replace any equipment that has failed. "