It must have been a fairly busy day.
BT announced that the Department for Work and Pension’s (DWP) newly installed IP Telephony platform handled over 1,000,000 calls in a single day.
According to BT’s news release:
The Integrated Communications Network Services (ICONS) programme being implemented at the DWP is one of the largest converged data and voice networks in northern Europe. It is part of a two-year DWP IT transformation programme designed to extract the maximum value from IT in order to support the reform and delivery of public services. The DWP’s two existing networks are being replaced be a single Voice-over IP network capable of carrying data, voice and video. This will allow the department’s frontline staff to more effectively manage their workflow, reduce data-access times and facilitate teamworking and collaboration via video-conferencing.
The technology underpinning the infrastructure that has enabled BT to achieve this milestone is from Nortel.
Specifically:
- BT has installed the Nortel Communication Server 2000 Carrier class softswitch in its core network to provide hosted IP telephony and IP Contact Center services for DWP
- Currently 435 sites around the UK serving over 35,000 DWP employees have been migrated to the new system
- 24,000 new Nortel 2002 IP handsets and nearly 4,000 fax and other analogue devices are in use over the new network
- BT is replacing the entire DWP estate of PBX and other legacy telephony services with the Nortel hosted Service that will ultimately support DWP's Telephony & Contact Center users
- Nortel DWDM Optical and network security products are also provided in this complete end-to-end network solution
