Rel Comm Inc., a voice and data products provider serving upstate New York offers design, engineering, installation, training, and maintenance of current, upgraded, or new telecommunications systems.

Joe Marasco, sales director of Rel Comm took some time recently to chat with me about their company's success with Phybridge (News - Alert)'s UniPhyer and how the offering helped them to satisfy the demands of one customer in the education vertical.

Marasco noted that the school application was a capital bid that was put together through a consultant and was written around a Nortel (News - Alert) product.

The school system, who Marasco said had been one of the company's maintenance customers, wanted to upgrade their Nortel platform.

A process Marasco said, depending on what software level they were at, could be a very expensive endeavor, particularly at the time, about a year ago when the project was done.

Instead, Rel Comm offered an alternative Mitel (News - Alert) product on an IP basis that would keep all the analog phones in their classrooms.

Phybridge's UniPhyer provided the PoE and Ethernet leveraging the existing two wire infrastructures - eliminating the need to re-cable and disrupt operations.

This, according to Marasco helped the project costs to come in at about 20 percent below what the Nortel upgrade would have been.

For the district, Marasco said their company was able to provide not only a more "state-of-the-art" based phone system, but also something that was new and met all of their needs.

"Actually, we brought the Phybridge UniPhyer into our demo room and set it up and ran about a thousand feet of cable off to an IP phone using the UniPhyer and we were able to prove that even phones that are at a distance of over one thousand feet, will still be able to be IP - so it was quite impressive," Marasco said.

"We installed that system about 6 months ago, and we've had no complaints and the customer has been very happy."

For more, check out the #1 VoIP Enabler: Risk-free, Quick & Easy Deployment channel on TMCnet.