Toyota cuts call costs with VOIP in Australia

06.09.2006
Toyota Material Handling (TMH) has cut telco costs by replacing a 10-year-old PABX system with VOIP and leveraging its existing WAN.

It follows a year-long search to find an alternative to its A$14,000 (US$10,788) worth of ISDN inter-office line charges and thousands of phone calls placed between sites.

The 100-user VOIP system TMH selected connects its main Adelaide office with two Melbourne sites and mobile staff and also allows existing analogue handsets to operate, which is necessary to communicate with financial institutions.

TMH network and systems manager Simon Hoby selected a Nortel solution because it accommodated the legacy analogue system.

"[The VOIP system] give us flexibility to connect the older PCs to dial-up modems; this is necessary to communicate with banks and other institutions still stuck on dial-up. We use our core network infrastructure to route IP telephony calls between branches and mobile workers, " Hoby said.

"We can also use the system for local call hop-offs, meaning calls that are placed between Adelaide and Melbourne are always charged at a local rate, even though they're interstate."