|
Operating around the world in a wide variety of business sectors
Mitsubishi Corporation's business extends into almost every area of
international trade. What may surprise you is that Mitsubishi
Corporation doesn’t make cars or electrical goods - these businesses
are owned by other, independent companies who share the
Mitsubishi name. In Japan, Mitsubishi Corporation is classed as one of
the top general trading corporations.
Mitsubishi operate in about 20 sites within EMEA with their European
Head Quarters located in London. In 2000 most of their sites were
interconnected with private leased lines for inter-office voice
communication (in addition to international connections to Japan),
with local PSTN breakout for each office. At this time major offices
such as London, Paris and Düsseldorf were looking to migrate off
Frame Relay to cheaper leased lines for interoffice connectivity.
The ongoing costs of Frame Relay proved prohibitively expensive to
maintain and so a decision was made to slowly migrate all European
offices onto alternative technologies. Early in 2001 Cisilion
approached Mitsubishi Corporation with a solution which not only
replaced Frame Relay connectivity for some offices, but totally
mitigated the need for international private leased lines for voice
communication. This utilised a mix of traditional leased line and VPN
technologies.
The solution for voice was Cisco Voice over IP (VoIP). The fact that
Mitsubishi Corporation was investing in new infrastructure meant
there was a natural progression towards VoIP between some offices.
Since 2001 this resulted in the majority of their offices migrating
towards a central VoIP infrastructure for inter-office calls and the
eventual adoption of voice over the Internet for some offices.
Mitsubishi Corporation’s offices have a mixed vendor environment of PBX’s, including Bosch, Nortel
and Alcatel meaning a common standard protocol would be the simplest solution for integration.
Initially only the largest offices were migrated to VoIP in conjunction with the adoption of newly
installed leased lines. Typically these larger offices, London, Paris and Düsseldorf had higher staffing
levels and high inter-site call patterns.
London, Paris and Düsseldorf office PBX’s were integrated into Cisco routers using E1 PRI voice links
and Qsig, a standard protocol for PBX interoperability. The routers then packetised both the signalling
and voice for inter-site calls. One of the many benefits of this type of integration was the delivery of
caller name identification allowing users at each office to recognise who was calling by name.
As Mitsubishi Corporation moved other sites away from their Frame Relay network onto leased lines,
voice services naturally migrated to VoIP for inter-site calls. Remaining offices were integrated using
a mixture of analogue E&M, FXO and digital BRI Qsig connections, creating an EMEA VoIP network
between most of their EMEA offices.
Alongside this deployment their Asian and American branch were deploying their own inter-site VoIP
communications infrastructure, to which the EMEA VoIP infrastructure was eventually integrated to.
The major benefits for Mitsubishi Corporation for this project were as follows:
- Reduced costs for inter-site office calls due to convergence of voice and data onto one
communications link (replacement of Frame Relay network included). Estimated savings are
somewhere in the order of £250,000.00.
- Reduced costs for maintenance of hardware due to combination of voice and data services
into already existing units.
- Increased throughput for inter-site calling, more calls available.
- Improved voice quality for EMEA inter-site calling.
- Added information for inter-site calls such as Caller Line Identifier and Calling Name.
- Peter Cowler, Mitsubishi Corporation.
Back to VoIP case studies
Back to case studies
|
The Background