PAACO Moves Into VoIP in Small Steps

07/25/2002

Taking a cautious approach that is typical of many enterprises, PAACO Automotive Group, a large auto dealership targeting the Hispanic community in Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston, is trialing voice over IP in several locations and may migrate its entire organization to the new technology if it continues to perform well.
PAACO has contracted with IP network provider Masergy Communications Inc. to link its 25 locations. The IP network has given the dealership the ability to change or schedule bandwidth capacity, set prioritization of packets, applications, servers and workstations, and change the network topology on the fly.
PAACO is working additionally with hosted IP voice provider Red Gap Inc., using its IP voice services to IP phones in its smaller locations
Steve Hall, vice president of information systems at PAACO, says the company had intended to add IP voice after moving to the Masergy network. "We felt they had a superior network that would allow for voice quality and the prioritization that we needed, so we could assign priority to packets for videoconferencing, voice over IP or whatever we wanted to do."
Hall's long-term plan is still "to link with a central IP server and voicemail, etc." However, changes in the economy made the company re-evaluate a large up-front capital expense, such as a Cisco Systems AVVID system. Also, PAACO decided to move more slowly to IP voice, and Red Gap offered an alternative. "We like the flexibility to grow on our own basis, to experiment a little bit and on a pay-as-you-go basis, which we couldn"t do if we had to buy an AVVID server."
Today, PAACO is using IP voice in a few locations, mostly offices with three or four staff, where it is not cost-effective to put in a PBX or even a key system. With IP phones and interfaces to the PBX, the offices can be on the same phone system as the rest of the company. It also saves on connection costs. "Where we are using voice over IP, we are using it over a converged network, our data network," Hall says. "For locations that used to have a dedicated T1 tie line just to do voice, now we are just using a channel on a dedicated T1 [for the IP voice]. In some cases we have IP phones talking back and forth.
All in all, Hall says, "The voice quality is fine. Just in the initial trials we had to go through a learning curve to make sure all the routers are configured as they should be, and Masergy worked with us on that. So we are pleased with the progress."
He adds, "It's not so tough [to do IP voice], especially if you do it in tiny steps. We are a little nervous about doing the entire enterprise in one fell swoop, which was the direction we were heading at one point. And, if it doesn't work, you have to unwind the whole thing."

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