US Auto Dealership Saves $350,000 per Year with Sangoma SBCs
The Customer
With six locations spread across the mid-Atlantic region and into Pennsylvania, this car dealership maintained a healthy, functioning business. However, they also realized that they were missing an opportunity to significantly reduce their operating expense by using SIP Trunks. The dealership’s extensive use of leased telephone lines interconnecting branch locations with headquarters generated a substantial monthly telephone bill. The dealership had heard that they could reduce their operating expenses by using VoIP, but they needed help in effectively implementing a solution across all their locations. They engaged BlueCloud Consultants to help them with this project.
Business Challenges
Basic SIP trunk service is reliable, but connecting SIP trunks to a PBX is not always straightforward. At the core of this dealership’s phone system is a fully redundant pair of IP PBXs that provide voice routing and extended telephone functions to all of their branch offices, including a full unified communications implementation. Located at their corporate headquarters, the high-availability IP PBX pair features redundant Internet connections using cable, DSL, and 4G wireless. This IP-PBX core supports 280 extensions across all six of their locations. The high-availability IP PBXs use an extended SIP message-set to manage a rich suite of call features, but the available SIP trunks expected a very basic SIP message-set to setup and teardown calls. This interoperability mismatch between the IP PBX pair and the SIP trunks prevented reliable VoIP service from being delivered. When the SIP trunk received a command it did not understand, it dropped the call. It was essential to have an SBC which recognizes which SIP commands to forward to the SIP trunk, and which ones to process internally or ignore.
Solutions from Sangoma
BlueCloud Consulting knew that SIP interoperability issues can be corrected with a Session Border Controller (SBC). However, they tested SBCs from a number of manufacturers and could not find an SBC that properly managed the interoperability issues between the customer’s high-availability IP-PBXs and the SIP trunks from the selected Internet Telephone Service Provider (ITSP). BlueCloud Consulting then tested a Sangoma SBC with the dealership’s high-availability IP PBX cluster. The Sangoma SBC properly handled all SIP commands, forwarding call setup and teardown messages to the SIP trunk, but processing refer messages internally without sending them to the SIP trunk. This allowed the IP-PBXs to function properly and prevented the SIP trunk from dropping calls.
The Results
BlueCloud Consultants found that the Sangoma SBC’s use of regular expressions to define the dial plan made it easier to develop processing rules compared to the convoluted and complicated approach required by many other SBCs. The sophisticated debugging tools available on the Sangoma SBC also made it much easier to get the solution up and running. BlueCloud Consultants has had great success using Sangoma SBCs to deliver a fully operational and reliable VoIP solution in a scenario with a sophisticated and high-availability IP PBX cluster, offering a full unified communications implementation and serving numerous branch offices. By deploying Sangoma SBCs on the client’s premises, BlueCloud Consultants were able to save this VoIP project, which may otherwise have been abandoned by the dealership. By switching from conventional telephone lines to VoIP, the dealership saves about $350,000 per year.