When Roger Fahnestock started work in 2002 as IT director of Kane County, Ill., he found a mishmash of antiquated voice and data networks so sorely in need of an upgrade that almost any change would have been an improvement.

By embracing the idea of a converged voice-data network and planning beyond today's needs, in just three years the county has not only eliminated inadequate systems, but also has saved money and set itself up for future growth.

A 100M bit/sec Ethernet metropolitan-area network and VoIP have combined to make applications more reliable and improve services by making sure that callers seeking help will reach the people they need.

When Fahnestock arrived, the phone system was a smorgasbord. "We had different PBX types from AT&T Partners to Merlin Systems," he says. "We had a David system; we had a Nortel Meridian. We had lots of Centrex-managed lines from SBC - some 2,200 phone numbers at a cost of about $685,000 per year. All of it was mix and match and not connected to the other phone systems." Some calls within county offices were billed as local long-distance.

The county had about 1,600 phones with only 600 Centigram voice mailboxes running on a BSD Unix box. "They were running an enterprise voice mail off a little cloned desktop in the corner. It's almost comical," Fahnestock says. The phones that had mailboxes didn't have indicator lights to signal when they had voice mail.

With a Cisco Call Manager VoIP system, everyone has voice mail, there are no charges to transfer to other county extensions, hunt groups can be rapidly realigned to address high call rates near elections and tax time, and uptime has improved, he says. And annual operating costs for the phone system have dropped to about $400,000.

On the data side, when Fahnestock first saw the network, it relied on an IBM System 390 mainframe that hadn't been IP enabled and a mix of 3Com and IBM token-ring gear serving 1,500 employees in 20 buildings spread out over four cities.

The WAN infrastructure consisted of T-1s that frequently failed and frame relay connections. Application development for the mainframe was stagnant.

"Coming here was like a flashback. I worked in a college in 1996 and we were migrating them off token ring to a switched network," he says. "I come here, and it's 2002, and they're still on token ring."