Toll savings: Global training firm saves with VoIP

America-Mideast Educational and Training Services cuts costs.

With 25,000 to 30,000 students each year depending on educational and training services, it's critical that the employees of America-Mideast Educational and Training Services be in constant contact. But the fear of high toll costs left the company's 350 administrators in the United States, Middle East and Africa out of touch with one another.

"When people think they're going to have to pay for a call, they don't make that call. Our toll charges were expensive, and we were paying quite a bit for each call," says IT Director Ugur Usumi.

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With 25,000 to 30,000 students each year depending on educational and training services, it's critical that the employees of America-Mideast Educational and Training Services be in constant contact. But the fear of high toll costs left the company's 350 administrators in the United States, Middle East and Africa out of touch with one another.

Name Ugur Usumi Title Director of Information Technologies Organization America-Mideast Educational and Training Services (AMIDEAST) Location Washington, D.C. Industry Provider of international training and education in the Middle East and North Africa Ugur Usumi on call quality: “If you’re using voice over IP from overseas, try to get higher speed connections. The higher the speed, the better the voice over IP is, like everything else. However, even at lower speeds, with compression in the IP phones, we’ve been able to make quality calls.”

Click to see: Call quality tips from AMIDEAST's Usumi

"When people think they're going to have to pay for a call, they don't make that call. Our toll charges were expensive, and we were paying quite a bit for each call," says IT Director Ugur Usumi.

To boost collaboration and lower international toll charges, Usumi added the VoIP feature to his Siemens PBX, enabling VoIP to most of the company's 16 international offices.

The AMIDEAST network includes a combination of IP phones and regular phones. Users on regular phones dial into the PBX, which switches the traffic to VoIP. For the IP phones, Usumi programs them at the home office and sends them to users in the field.

Each office can now call any other via four-digit dialing or by using the PBX in Washington, D.C., to call outside of the company. "In the past, that kind of calling might have cost $1.50 per minute. Now we're able to talk to the field offices any time we want without international toll charges," he says, adding that all the features available to users in the D.C. office are available to the field offices.

This has enabled increased collaboration. "We now have staff from Lebanon, Cairo and Morocco all on the same conference call at the same time. We are arriving at decisions much quicker," he says.

Usumi has tied in unified messaging with the new system to enable users to receive voice mail as e-mail and vice versa. He also rolled out softphones so users can take advantage of the VoIP system from airports and hotels.

He says the VoIP system has saved the company at least $1,000 per month in international calling costs.

Read more about voip & convergence in Network World's VoIP & Convergence section.