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VA Solwise Coalition Wins BBC Vote
High profile contracts do not come much more prominent than providing a wide range of communication applications for the BBC’s Election Day news coverage. Virtual Access dual ADSL routers were recommended because of their flexibility, reliability and MLPPP bonding capability.
Solutions provided have to work first time and every time on the day and this was the prospect facing Solwise, the specialist hosted telephony division of Pinnacle Telecom Group plc, when they were asked in February 2010 to suggest a communications solution to allow the BBC to communicate easily between all the hundreds of different locations they would report from throughout their coverage including TV centres in London and Manchester.
SOLUTION
Solwise was already a supplier of hosted telephony solutions to the BBC via their proven SIPSwitch platform. They therefore planned to locate 90 IP handsets at each of the two TV centres in their respective main Election Night studios and support over 300 analogue and ISDN-based extensions dialling into SIPswitch from other sites around the country. Solwise were given just two weeks notice of a full rehearsal to be held on 15 February 2010, the success of which resulted in them being awarded the contract. At that stage the BBC believed the earliest an election could have been called was 1st March.
In locations around the rest of the UK, for example, in constituency counting halls, political party headquarters and special sites such as the Andrew Neil election night boat moored on the Thames embankment, a combination of analogue and ISDN lines were installed for contact to and from the TV centres.
Here Solwise drew on the support of their parent company, Pinnacle Telecom Group plc, a BT Wholesale partner with WLR3 access via Strategic Imperatives. Lines were installed by Openreach and some locations were ‘very challenging’ including the London boat which would only be in position for a period of just 18 hours.
In the TV centres, Solwise installed Virtual Access GW7000 series dual ADSL routers, each of which provided a Layer 2 MLPPP Bonded connection over two Annexe M DSL circuits from Opal Telecom. Each Virtual Access router supported 45 snom 320 IP handsets so two routers were installed in each location. The Manchester and London TV centres were mirrored to provide the BBC with full access and resiliency.
Should a circuit fail in London the others would failover to maintain the service in an instant and if circuits were to fail in Manchester then service would automatically be maintained for that TV centre by London – and of course vice versa. The TV centres in London and Manchester were connected to each other by optical fibre links. Such a level of multiple failover provision would ensure complete continuity of service on Election Day for the BBC.
The use of the Virtual Access dual ADSL routers by Solwise was recommended because of their flexibility, reliability and MLPPP bonding capability.
Nick Sacke, Head of Sales and Marketing Support at Pinnacle said, “The ability to properly bond two ADSL2+ circuits reliably is fairly unique and by using Annexe M technology we were in this instance able to achieve guaranteed peak upstream speeds of 3Meg. In our opinion Virtual Access has produced a highly scalable and robust Multilink PPP solution for bonded voice connectivity, prior to which we had only ever got Multilink PPP to work for data communications applications”.
The Virtual Access router has proved to be very stable and reliable in use as well as being highly cost-effective. The return on investment achieved is outstanding and for Solwise this is especially so as our events activities around the UK mean we can use their routers over and over again.
From an engineering perspective the Virtual Access router also brings us some unique support benefits. A built-in modem means that we can configure the unit even if the DSL circuits are down.
The Virtual Access centralised router configuration utility, along with standard configuration profiles also helps simplify and speed up deployments. In the case of the BBC installation for example, we used a standard profile for voice communications. In the case of other client’s projects requiring data services, we would use a separate router profile. Either configuration profile can be provisioned to a Virtual Access router automatically upon connection to the ADSL circuit.
The use of Virtual Access routers for resilience, failover and high speed access compliments our business very well where the key differentiator is often the rapid deployment of hosted telephony services.”
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