CASE STUDY

ASTERISK PBX PILOT FOR TOWN OF MANCHESTER, CONN.

This case study describes a pilot launched by Softel where 6 Asterisk PBX servers and up to 1,500 IP phones are being deployed for the Town of Manchester, CT. The new phone system, which is spread out over 44 buildings, will serve all of the town's schools, administrative offices, police and fire departments. This is the largest deployment to date of an open source PBX for a municipal government within the U.S.

According to Jack McCoy, Manchester's CIO, the town will save almost $200,000 per year by having Softel replace the existing Centrex system with Asterisk. The town chose Asterisk over competitive products like Cisco Call Manager for 3 main reasons. First, the cost to deploy Asterisk was less than half that of other proprietary PBX systems. Second, the town did not want to be tied to a single vendor for the IP phones. Asterisk supports a wide variety of SIP phones from different vendors, ranging in price from $85 to $500. Finally, Manchester needed some custom applications developed such as Enhanced 911 service and mass automated dialing with pre-recorded announcements (e.g., school closing announcements). Asterisk's open source platform makes it easy to rapidly develop these kinds of applications. Softel's team was able to develop the 911 software according to Manchester's requirements within a few weeks.

Shortly after the installation, load tests were performed using 150 soft phones, and all tests were successful. Thousands of calls were completed successfully within the course of a few hours. The system is also highly reliable and completely fault tolerant. If any PBX server goes down, calls are automatically re-routed to one of the other servers. Softel also provided a graphical management application called SigMAN (developed by Signate), which made it easy for Manchester's technical personnel to set up the system and add users.