See and react to site conditions reliably and in a time that matters
This client figures among the 10 largest residential telephone providers in the US, with service covering more than 8.1 million people in 21 states. In addition, the company provides voice and data network communications and managed services (servers, firewall, data storage, cloud-based voice, etc.) to businesses in the country. A few years ago, they started to use Multitel’s FUSION in order to resolve a problem that was becoming more and more worrying: their old and unsupported remote terminal units (RTU) were starting to fail due to their age.
However, they discovered that Multitel’s FUSION could bring much
more than what they had expected.
CHALLENGES
OLD AND UNSUPPORTED RTUS IN PLACE, STARTING TO FAIL DUE TO THEIR AGE
The client had a variety of RTUs purchased from different companies more than a few decades ago. Because of their age, they were starting to fail and, because they were no longer supported by the manufacturer, they were causing severe reliability problems that the company needed to address promptly. In addition to the old RTUs, they were still using many modems to communicate through their telecom sites, since many sites had no IP connectivity implemented yet. This meant they had to dial into old modem banks and run the information into the same old pieces of equipment, which were unsupported and unreliable.
NO REAL TIME MONITORING
In the past, the client also had no capability to monitor specific power plant values such as the voltage, the current, and the AC power. All these readings could only be done manually. This meant that they had to send somebody to the site to get the readings. There was no way to do this in real time. When the engineers needed to have a clear view of the situation, they had no other choice but to send somebody on site to take the readings and wait before they could continue with their work. This was very time consuming and added delay to the deployment of new equipment.
SOLUTIONS
SO MANY FEATURES AT SUCH A LOW PRICE
The client started to look at several different solutions in order to gradually replace their old equipment. At first glance, the FUSION seemed to offer more features but at a lower price. Therefore, the reason they decided to go with the FUSION was, at first, based entirely on price. They just wanted to do dry contact monitoring and thus, they compared the price per alarm point of different solutions offered on the market : the FUSION was the least expensive. Then, they started to look at what additional features were included in this magic box. They realized they also had the ability to do power monitoring at the price they were already paying.
SUPPORT
Regarding all that old and unsupported equipment, the client is still amazed by the outstanding support they received from Multitel’s service team. For instance, the company still has sites where they alarm old modem banks that are no longer supported. Multitel is going to provide them with new software and firmware that will allow a remote FUSION to dial into a gateway FUSION, and then transmit those alarms from the gateway, via IP, to their monitoring system.
RELIABILITY
More importantly, the FUSION’s reliability has proven itself in the company’s network. They have had some equipment in place for more than a decade now, and it is still perfectly functional.
RESULTS
The biggest positive result experienced by the client using Multitel’s Fusion was to be able to see and react to site conditions reliably and in a time that matters. And, the most important reason why they would recommend the FUSION to other telecom companies is the service they receive whenever they need support with a feature or a special inquiry
SERVICE
This is the most important day-to-day big win the client experienced by doing business with Multitel: «The service is outstanding! So far, I don’t think there’s been any question or concern we had that has not been addressed immediately. We have requested several features that have been implemented right away in the next firmware version.» Multitel’s service team is always willing to take the time to configure each unit according to the client’s requirements.
POWER MONITORING AND CAPACITY MANAGEMENT
With the FUSION, the client knows ahead of time if they are getting close to capacity on power plants. The FUSION also allows some creative methods of transmitting alarms that were not available to them before. If you are still using old and unsupported RTUs and, like this client, you need to start replacing this unreliable equipment, you might want to follow the experience described here and go for a low cost, easy to use solution that comes with outstanding support.
