Town of St. Marys
The Town of St. Marys, home to approximately 7,000 residents, is one of Ontario’s oldest and most appealing communities, offering a unique rural lifestyle with urban amenities. Residents enjoy a high quality of life and an affordable cost of living. The community offers new and seasoned homeowners a variety of reasonably priced housing options, from new builds in subdivisions to historic homes in established neighbourhoods. As a separated town, St. Marys’ complement of municipal services rivals those offered in many larger centres.
To maintain its outstanding service level, The Town was needed to replace its soon to be unsupported Phone Switches, the BCM 450 and BCM 50’s. Upon initial installation of these systems over 8 years ago, The Town was one of the first in Southern Ontario to implement a multi‐site design with the BCM’s utilizing a mixture of Digital and IP sets.There were a number of challenges with the old system:
- Voicemail and call forwarding to different sites was not possible
- Adding a new phone set was challenging
- Everything needed licensing
- Support was ending
The UCX450 was appealing to the Town for a variety of reasons:
- We could collapse the existing BCM’s, remove the support contracts and run everything from a central system with one support contract
- Call routing to/from all sites could be seamless
- Programming was far less involved then the BCM
- All the features were included
- We could save approximately $10,000 on re‐using existing phones
The Town implemented the UCX450 in the spring of 2016 with the help of Alpha Telecom Services Inc. The cutover was a great success, and the system was preconfigured which allowed for minimal down time. Alpha Telecom ironed out any issues that arose with ease and met all of the Town’s needs. Training happened during the cutover allowing myself to make necessary changes as we brought all the sets online. Since the cut‐over I have activated 10+ sets, and reconfigured portions of the call routing, all without a support call. I am very happy with the UCX and I am excited to implement more of its features that we never had with the BCM in the near future.
Mike Kuttschrutter, Network Administrator
York Support Services Network
At York Support Services Network, we offer a range of case management and community crisis services across seven regional municipalities, providing support for individuals with a developmental disability or serious mental illness. With case managers often on the road supporting our community members, the existing communication system we were using was quite outdated, costly to operate and lacked the features we needed to stay connected with our dedicated support team. The experts at Alpha Telecom installed an E-MetroTel UCXVoIP and UC solution that provided all the features we needed including Find Me Follow Me mobility, Remote Office calling, centralized dial plan, call recording, conferencing and voice-mail to email. The transition to UCXwas very smooth and using SIP trunking has lowered our costs significantly.
Sandy McClymont, Director of Finance and Operations
