Straitshot Intelligent Private Networks are reliable and cost-effective for distributed enterprises. R. W. Beck is one of many national organizations that have successfully utilized Straitshot services for connectivity.
R. W. Beck Case Study
Management consulting and engineering firm R.W. Beck, Inc., has been providing premium services to energy and water utilities and solid-waste management companies in both the public and private sector since 1942. Known to their customers as strategic problem solvers, Beck took a similar approach when seeking to prepare its network for voice over IP (VoIP). The company did its research and chose Straitshot's innovative, cost-effective solution.
The Challenge: Improving WAN Performance to Support VoIP
R.W. Beck began to deploy IP PBX systems for its offices around the U.S. on its existing frame relay WAN from a major provider but soon found that network performance fell short of the company's demands. For Beck's five largest offices - Seattle, Orlando, Boston, Denver, and Nashville - the frame relay solution provided bandwidth ranging from 512 kbps to 1.5 Mbps, all with standard committed information rates (CIRs) of only 50%. The company knew that adding VoIP traffic to the data network would require more bandwidth and that it would need high levels of performance from the network - but the company didn't want to increase its WAN costs.
The increasing use of VoIP also highlighted a significant problem with the existing network. Although the existing IP PBX system could mark voice traffic as high priority, the frame relay network could not inspect the traffic and enforce any prioritization rules. This resulted in unacceptable voice quality.
According to Don Bird, R.W. Beck, Inc., Director of Information Technology, "During times of heavy WAN traffic load, the frame relay network could not differentiate VoIP traffic from other WAN traffic such as large file transfers and financial applications. As a result, voice call quality suffered." Beck needed to solve the network issues affecting voice quality before rolling out VoIP to the company's other offices.
The Solution: Straitshot Deploys Private WAN Service and Makes VoIP Work
By leveraging Straitshot's Intelligent Private Network (IPN) service, R.W. Beck found that Straitshot's class-of-service (CoS) prioritization capabilities ensured voice quality regardless of WAN traffic loads. Straitshot's IPN service also delivered quality of service (QoS) across the entire network, providing both guaranteed bandwidth and the superior latency and jitter thresholds necessary for clear VoIP calls. At the same time, Straitshot offered substantially higher bandwidth at a cost lower than Beck's frame relay network.
Straitshot's IPN enables R. W. Beck to control costs without compromise. Now R. W. Beck can run voice and data on the same WAN infrastructure without performance limitations or costs associated with legacy network architectures.
In addition to setting up Beck's VoIP system to run smoothly, Straitshot's services help R. W. Beck's employees easily and reliably access the professional services company's mission-critical time tracking and client billing applications hosted in Seattle. As well as using email and transferring engineering files up to 100 MB, employees also use the WAN to access the company intranet hosted in Seattle and Orlando for human resources information and other corporate data.
The Result: Better Performance at a Much Lower Cost
According to Bird, the Straitshot solution offers three times more bandwidth than did the frame relay network, a change network users easily noticed.
Straitshot users enjoy guaranteed, dedicated bandwidth with quality and class of service maintained end to end, all the time. Straitshot's fully meshed architecture eliminates any single point of failure inherent in hub-and-spoke architectures while improving overall network efficiency. R. W. Beck enjoys the benefits of privacy and superior performance, all at a lower cost than the previous network.
In the Future: More VoIP Coming Down the Line
Beck's IT department doesn't yet feel comfortable with 100% VoIP everywhere and still likes the reliability of the standard digital PBX. Nevertheless, Bird consistently hears that the employees greatly appreciate the convenience of a 4-digit dial to any office that VoIP allows. To further leverage Straitshot's IPN, the company plans to switch its Nashville, Boston, Phoenix and Sacramento offices to VoIP within the next six months.
Notes:
- Customer
- R. W. Beck
- Challenge
- Improve voice quality for multi-location VoIP deployment
- Improve overall network performance compared to existing Frame Relay solution
- Solution
- Straitshot provides it IPN service, a secure, cost-effective WAN solution that delivers Quality and Class of Service (QoS & CoS) across the entire network
- Results
- High quality VoIP end user experience
- Over $40,000 in annual savings
- Three times higher bandwidth than with prior solution
- Improved productivity for consultants
- Key Applications and Resources Accessed
- VoIP
- Critical financial applications used for time tracking and client billing
- File Transfer, including CAD files of up to 100 MB
- Employee intranet from Seattle and Orlando offices, which includes HR information
"Only Straitshot offered us all of the benefits of a private
IP network - guaranteed security, performance and reliability
- for a very reasonable cost. Given our experience - three time
better network performance combined with over $40,000 in savings
this year, we are very pleased with our decision to deploy Straitshot's
innovative solution."
Don Bird, Director of IT
The Straitshot network was designed from the ground up to address the challenges of running data, VoIP and video applications on a single network.
Straitshot provides a fully managed network service that enables enterprises to securely share mission critical data, voice and video applications between multiple locations without touching the Internet.
For more information visit www.straitshot.com.