Jephson Housing Association was established in 1970 and is a subsidiary of Jephson Homes. Jephson Housing Group is a medium sized housing association group with three subsidiaries managing around 14,600 homes. The group's operations are spread throughout England and have a network of 9 offices.
BACKGROUND
Jephson required a new infrastructure to enable a resilient, secure scaleable network which would also enable the inclusion of a VoIP system and Video Conferencing. After a consultation with SICL, Jephson Housing developed business objectives which included a smooth transition to the new network infrastructure with minimal business disruption. The fundamental requirement being, appropriately designed, reliable, resilient and scaleable network to support data, voice and video applications. The key to the solution was the need to connect 5 locations into a call at the same time and the need to support multiple simultaneous conferences. Jephson also required the ability to transmit a presentation through video conference.
OBJECTIVES
A major objective was to reduce the amount of time and cost incurred as a business from employees travelling to the various sites throughout the UK. The solution needed to be flexible and provide Jephson with booking room reservation / conference set-up system and remote management of the systems, and have a tangible Return On Investment balance against travel.
SOLUTION
SICL designed the IP infrastructure and by configuring QoS (Quality of Service), was able to apply a dedicated amount of bandwidth to video conferencing without affecting other business-critical applications and had the capability to support all features required along with the ability to carry out Multisite calls for up to 6 sites simultaneously where required (based on bandwidth availability).
Jephson can also share data via a laptop or PC, allowing the presenter and the presentation to be viewed simultaneously.
The equipment comprised of separate pan/tilt/zoom camera, codec, table microphone, remote control and full cable pack. With an LCD screen on a locking cabinet, the codec hidden within the cabinet and the camera fitted above the screen, the solution provided portability whilst still being secure.
RESULTS
Jephson Housing has experienced many benefits since the implementation of the video conferencing solution. It provided Jephson with less expensive communication links between sites and achieved the significant return on investment compared with the previous travel expenditure.
