Tenor®-Based Solution Provides ROI in Under 8 Months

The Business Environment
Boules Trading is an established UK specialist textile business that designs and supplies children's clothing to High Street retailers' own brands such as BHS, John Lewis, Laura Ashley, Mothercare and Tesco. Design offices are based in London. Manufacturing is controlled by its office in New Delhi.

Inter-office international telephone charges were becoming a significant overhead. The company wanted to drive out costs from the supply chain in order to remain price competitive as a "lean supplier" for its customers. Geoffrey Bourne, the owner of Boules Trading, and an engineer by profession, was interested in the possibility of using VoIP technology. Solutions were being provided by suppliers to the corporate market working with substantial leased line data links that were already installed. His project could not justify the high cost of consultants, or the cost of their recommended solutions.

The Technical Challenge
A business colleague suggested Bourne look into a specific VoIP gateway, the Quintum Tenor MultiPath Switch which is distributed by the Techland Group, a High Wycombe-based supplier of voice and data communications products. Bourne believed it might be possible to use the two Tenors over a simple ADSL Internet link. Using their own data compression software, these units were capable of transmitting all London to New Delhi phone calls over the Internet (IP) link for a fixed cost rather than normal telephony charges.

Bourne convinced Techland to let him trial two Tenors for a few weeks on his UK ADSL and Indian DSL link, due to his concerns over IP connectivity and its effect on voice quality. In the summer of 2002, Techland installed an 8-port analog Tenor in London and a 4-port analog Tenor in New Delhi.

Tenors were set up with telephone sets connected directly into each one. On successful completion of the trials, the UK Tenor was upgraded to a digital D800 and installed in its prescribed position, between the Alchemy digital PBX (now Avaya) and the PSTN. This extended the VoIP benefit to all UK staff via the PBX.

"The Tenors do exactly what they say they do," Bourne confirmed. "And they're so easy to use. If I want to ring reception, I just pick up my phone and dial 412, but if I want to dial reception in Delhi I just dial 450."

"With the Tenors, I didn't need to buy a new PBX or even upgrade the one I had," Bourne enthused. "And I didn't need to buy any expensive IP handsets either. That was a real cost savings over other VoIP solutions."

"Before installing the Tenors, calls were costing us 43p/min from the UK to India, and 65p/min from India to the UK," Bourne said. "It became obvious pretty quickly that the Tenors would save us a lot of money. We more than halved our overall business PSTN costs and our call charges to India dropped to virtually nil. Our telecom savings alone completely paid for the entire Tenor VoIP installation in less than nine months." With lower overhead, Boules Trading can become even more cost effective compared with its competitors, by driving costs out of its supply chain.

Quintum's Tenor VoIP MultiPath Solution Was The Perfect Fit

Assured Voice Quality
Even without implementing this Technology, which is designed to dynamically switch a call that is on the IP over to the public switched phone network if congestion threatens call quality, Boules still was happy with voice quality. They did, however, utilize PacketSaver™ Technology to minimize bandwidth usage on calls going to the same destination, thus ensuring that more calls can be carried over the IP and will be less likely to degrade.

Seamless Integration
There was no need to buy a new PBX, or upgrade the existing network. Tenors were implemented on Boules' existing network infrastructure. In fact, they were even able to use the phone sets that were already in place.

Ease of Use
Quintum's Tenor Switches allow end users to use their phones in the same fashion as they always have in their UK office. But now, to call the India office, they only needed to dial a three-digit interoffice extension.

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