Data Centres | Nexus IP

What the ISDN switch off means for your business?

Nexus IP — Wed, 29 Mar 2017 08:33:47 +0000

What the ISDN switch off means for your business?

Earlier this year BT announced to switch off the ISDN networks and replace with SIP by 2025. Although it’s still a decade away ISDN users need to come up with a strategy to avoid having their phone lines cut when the service comes to its final breath. In fact, BT will start to switching off the service from 2020.

ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) are digital lines. They are formatted as either ISDN2e or ISDN30

SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) is used to establish a voice connection between two end points across the Internet. SIP trunking delivers telephone lines using an external data connection as the bearer for the purpose of making and receiving calls.

ISND channel over SIP trunk

Benefit of SIP over ISDN

Scalability

ISDN services are limited across the channel blocks, SIP instead, is deployed across a business’s existing WAN. This means that provided the bandwidth exists to handle the traffic, channels can be dynamically added or subtracted as they are required.

Portability

In the ISDN deployment, the line and channel block, comes with an allocated phone number.

In a SIP based service numbers are separate from the channel blocks, which has the benefit of helping to lower the cost of the service. This means that calls to SIP numbers can be diverted incredibly easily to other locations.

Interoperability

SIP voice is transferred as IP (Internet Protocol), this means that customers with video enabled handsets can make video calls.

Same functionality is also available on an ISDN service but, the limited bandwidth requirement of video over ISDN make this an economically unjustifiable option.

Quality

SIP can be delivered across high bandwidth connections which means higher levels of vocal quality can be delivered from end to end. Therefore customers can make and receive HD quality voice calls, assuming of course their handsets are compatible.

SIP services could utilise a primary service with automatic failover to a second path, which is not available on ISDN.

Price

With ISDN your voice and data connection are on different lines. You will be able to save money by having both on one line. SIP trunking can reduce your costs by 50% on line rentals and 25% on calls.

When to migrate?

We would advise businesses to start thinking about migrating sooner rather than later. Now that ISDN is essentially viewed as a legacy platform, investment in it is likely to fall. This could mean that the standard of the existing network, and support infrastructure, could begin to suffer the effects of being retired well before the 2025 switch off date.

How can we help?

Nexus IP can explain and advise you about the benefits of migrating to SIP. Unify, our preferred partner, offers robust and scalable SIP Trunking solutions that match the communication requirements of your business; streamline calls and connectivity charges, with the potential to eliminate call charges between business sites.

For advice and information about the benefits and savings of switching to a SIP service call 03452001770 or email: info@nexusip.com and we’ll get back to you.

The post What the ISDN switch off means for your business? first appeared on Nexus IP.

Seven Signs It’s Time to Move Up

Nexus IP — Thu, 02 Feb 2017 09:04:10 +0000

Seven Signs It’s Time to Move Up

As businesses grow, unified communications (UC) systems become increasingly sophisticated and complex.

Here are 7 signs to recognise when It’s time to move up to an Enterprise Communications:

You need to scale your operations

Expects to grow to more than 5 sites and/or about 500 employees in the next 2 – 4 years
Needs to manage growth centrally for cost control and agility
Wants a consistent, seamless experience across all locations

Business growth has created the need for enterprise architecture

Has a risk profile that requires tighter security and reliability measures to reduce the likelihood and extent of system failures
Needs to manage its network from the data centre and virtualize as much as possible

Personnel demand increased mobility and collaboration capacity

Has a portfolio of user devices that is likely to change or include user-provided devices
Needs highly secure voice and web collaboration
Possesses UC apps that may need to integrate with groupware solutions now or in the coming years
Requires a single enterprise-wide collaboration platform

Higher customer volume means more resources to manage

Multifunction call centre personnel
Access to complete customer data
More ways to customers to engage
Management of inbound and outbound customer contact

Process effectiveness has become critical to growth

Wants a system that provides flexible and easy integration options
Has sales and service functions that are growing and integrating with enterprise apps that speed processes and enable consistent process and communications with customers
Needs flexibility to integrate Unified Communication functions with a changing of devices, apps, and groupware solutions

You need to manage multiple locations from a single sites

Expects to have a large number of locations and needs the benefits of a centralised solution
Requires easy and flexible solutions for mobile and remote workers
Needs a highly secure, SIP-based network

IT department is strained to maintain systems

System Operation
User Support
Moves and changes
Integrations

If enough of those statements describe your situation, it may be time to step up to a new communication system!!

The post Seven Signs It’s Time to Move Up first appeared on Nexus IP.

When Data Centres Become Art

Nexus IP — Sun, 08 May 2016 19:30:58 +0000

When Data Centres Become Art

For many businesses, data centres are already an essential part of their storage and processes. Luckily, data centres and cloud storage are now affordable for practically any business, with business-grade cloud storage starting at as little as £0.40 per gigabyte, per month.

While many people use data centres, few give much thought to what they look like. As some of the world’s most valuable technology companies, we can certainly expect Google, Microsoft, and Facebook’s data centres to be works of art.

Google

Google has data centres around the world, in South Carolina, Iowa, Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Chile, Oregon, Taiwan, Singapore, Ireland, the Netherlands, Finland, and Belgium. With a company the size of Google, multiple separate data centres are essential to building true redundancy and ensuring that the business can function even if several data centres go down. It probably helps that they have a moat with alligators too.

You can find out more information on Google’s data centres or even take a short guided tour (virtually, of course) below.

Microsoft

This year we discovered that Microsoft are testing underwater data centres, which would reduce the need for cooling technology and improve energy efficiency. Since they’re responsible for over 3% of the world’s electricity usage, we can expect a lot of tech firms to be looking for solutions to this issue.

While they may look slightly less impressive than Google’s multi-coloured LEDs, these centres are incredible nonetheless.

Facebook

If Microsoft are taking notes from Ariel’s book for their data centres, Facebook’s approach definitely sounds more like a Bond villain – they keep their data centres cool by building some of them near the Arctic circle. If you post any sort of Facebook activity in Europe, it’s likely that your information is stored in sub-arctic Lulea. Over 350 million photographs get added to Facebook every single day, so it’s essential that their data centres can cater to their 1.65 billion users while minimising consumption – by building in such a cold climate the centre is 70% less energy intensive.

If you’d like to find out more about data centre benefits and see just how affordable data centres are, please get in touch.

The post When Data Centres Become Art first appeared on Nexus IP.