A leading US Power Company Puts Trust in Sangoma for their Diva Card Modem Solution
The Customer
A leading US power company has non-mobile utility meters deployed across a large geographical area, which report data back to headquarters through modems. These modems are enclosed within a large number of servers that connect to meters using serial or analog cable connections.
Business Challenges
The supplier of the modem solution decided to End-Of-Life their product, as well as their support and maintenance for the product. This placed the US power company in a difficult situation as they would no longer be able to rely on the supplier for future support if problems arose. In addition, this created a security risk for the power company as they would not be able to perform any OS updates on their systems. Since the modems would require updated drivers from the supplier to continue being compatible, they were left with limited options as they searched for an alternative, cost effective solution.
Solutions from Sangoma
The US power company approached Sangoma Technologies since they had a long history of providing modem connectivity in the payments and utility industries, as well as previous integration success with industry leading billing/metering software. Sangoma offers a product called Dialogic Diva Modem telephony cards, which are high density modem cards supporting up to 240 channels within a single server. They are compatible with most commercially available servers and are future proofed with driver support for the latest OS versions for both Linux and Windows. They come in a variety of analog and PRI connectivity options, as well as support for customized API integration and standard command line communication. The power company was in an ideal situation at this point. They avoided huge connectivity infrastructure upgrade costs since they did not have to upgrade to mobile and/or IP and could keep their infrastructure and existing meters in the field. They found the perfect cost-effective solution provided by Sangoma, and were also in a position where they could swap out their analog lines and switch to less expensive PRI since Sangoma offered PRI versions of their modem cards. Aside from the monthly cost savings, this move would also reduce their server maintenance costs since PRI lines handle more channels per physical cable than analog and can be concentrated, eliminating the quantity of servers out in the field.
The Results
The US power company chose to move away from analog lines and switched to PRI lines, deploying Dialogic Diva PRI modem cards across all their sites. Since these cards were highly compatible with their commercial hardware, they were able to reuse their existing server to install the Diva PRI cards, saving them from the hardware costs of purchasing new servers. The power company was also able to keep the existing meters in the field. Shortly after they deployed the new solution they successfully performed software updates to take advantage of some security improvements in the latest version of the OS which they were using. They were very pleased with the software compatibility and the support Sangoma provided them through the entire process. The US power company continues to build a relationship with Sangoma as they start to deploy the Vega VoIP gateways for other projects.