VoIP: Just what the doctor ordered

Old PBXs and a high volume of toll calls between 22 facilities forced Queens-Long Island Medical Group to find a better voice system.

"We were looking to reduce our existing phone bills by 40% to 50%, just on the service side," says Stefanie Bruemmer, IT director for the Garden City, N.Y., firm, which issued its RFP in December. "We weren't even sure we were going to use VoIP but considered it as one of our options."

But VoIP has turned out to be the cure for QLIMG's telecom woes.

To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

Old PBXs and a high volume of toll calls between 22 facilities forced Queens-Long Island Medical Group to find a better voice system.

"We were looking to reduce our existing phone bills by 40% to 50%, just on the service side," says Stefanie Bruemmer, IT director for the Garden City, N.Y., firm, which issued its RFP in December. "We weren't even sure we were going to use VoIP but considered it as one of our options."

But VoIP has turned out to be the cure for QLIMG's telecom woes.

IP Business Solutions, a company that resells Level 3 Communications services to businesses, was one of the vendors that answered the medical group's call. The supplier won QLIMG's business with Level 3's (3)Tone Business hosted VoIP service, which eliminates the cost of deploying and maintaining IP PBXs in-house. The service offers traditional PBX features such as four-digit dialing while doing away with toll charges by avoiding the public switched telephone network and sending all interoffice calls over the Internet. This was a big sell for Bruemmer.

"In the TDM world every call between sites was a toll call," she says. As the majority of the group's calls are between locations, the group's phone bills are substantial.

The medical firm had an "antiquated" Avaya TDM system that she says was probably bought in the 1980s.

"Our system was so outdated it would have cost about $1 million just to deploy new T-1 [voice circuits] at all of our locations," which would have been necessary to support a new PBX system, she says.

Enter VoIP

The medical group considered an MCI VoIP service, but "there were tremendous hidden costs to [using MCI's] softswitch," Bruemmer says. She says MCI service charges an additional cost for every incoming call, in addition to a flat monthly fee, but Level 3 does not charge for each incoming call.

Editors note: MCI says that it has never charged for incoming calls nor does it charge for them today.

Bruemmer says she choose Level 3's VoIP offering because it is cost effective and flexible. QLIMG expects to reduce its telecom costs by at least 40% once all of its sites are deployed next month.

With the (3)Tone service the medical group's only major investment was its 1,000 VoIP phones. While the firm also had to upgrade routers at each site, Bruemmer says it was a small project that only involved adding RAM or software.

"Before, I had 21 PBXs with a full-time employee to handle all moves, adds and changes," Bruemmer says. She plans to sell the old equipment and is eliminating the PBX management job.

QLIMG's help desk now will be able to manage all the VoIP phones because the system runs over the medical company's LAN.

"From the support systems side, all moves, adds and changes are now easily handled at the help desk [via] point and a click," she says. "We no longer have to send anyone out to handle these simple changes."