The good, bad and ugly of a VoIP implementation

Facing frequent outages in the DSL lines serving 50-plus corporate-owned Gold's gyms, Bobby Badugu knew it was time for a significant network upgrade. After conducting due diligence in April into the various options - including satellite, frame relay and a different DSL provider - he opted for a carrier-provided VoIP service. That's when the trouble began.

In the months that followed, the vice president of IT for Gold's Gym, based in Dallas, learned some valuable lessons about not only VoIP, but any major network project that involves upgrades to numerous, far-flung sites. Badugu shared his insights in a presentation at the recent Network World IT Roadmap Conference in Dallas. He said the lessons include using a phased implementation process; establishing clear service-level agreements (SLA), including penalties; and conducting a thorough technology assessment to identify potential problems.

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When the rollout began in June, it was scheduled to take eight weeks. As of mid-November, the data portion of the rollout is complete, but only about 20% of the voice lines have been ported to the VoIP network. Badugu remains bullish on VoIP, expects benefits including a 35% to 40% savings in voice and data service costs, and already is saving $6,000 to $10,000 on his conference calling. But if he had it to do over, he'd do more than a few things differently.

Requirements

Gold's Gym started in 1965 with a single facility in Venice, Calif. Through a series of licensing deals, mergers and acquisitions, the company grew to 660 gyms in 26 countries. Of the 550 U.S. Gold's gyms, most are franchises; about 50 are corporate-owned. Badugu is responsible for providing network services to those corporate-owned gyms, which are in California, Hawaii, Maryland, Missouri, Texas and the Washington, D.C., area.

Network services are particularly crucial to the gyms, because they rely on a central server for everything from member data to the retail point-of-sale system.

Badugu targeted satellite when he embarked on the upgrade project in February 2006, but he quickly learned that it wouldn't provide enough bandwidth. He also wasn't impressed with the available frame relay offerings, which he considered older and less flexible technology, and didn't feel comfortable with a DSL service from a different provider.

Then Badugu recalled a Qwest MPLS project from his consulting days, so he called in Qwest to inquire about VPN service.

"That's where we started," he said. "From there the proposal evolved to address a lot of our phone needs. That's when the VoIP solution was proposed."

Once voice was on the table, Badugu brought AT&T and Sprint into the discussion to see what they had to offer. But their proposals were too voice-centric and didn't have a strong strategy for combining voice and data, so Qwest won the day.

The big driver for upgrading the voice network was reducing costs for local, long-distance and conference calling. "As we add gyms and continue to grow our business, those costs became astronomical," Badugu said.