Kool Smiles Cuts Costs 40 Percent with SIP Trunks

Last month during the SIP Trunk Seminars at the Miami Beach ITEXPO (News - Alert), Kool Smiles presented an astonishing case study of their own experience using SIP trunks. Theirs is a great example of how quickly, and effectively, SIP trunks can impact your bottom line.

Kool Smiles is a network of local dental offices with a mission to expand access to high quality dental care to underserved children and young adults. They needed a robust alternative to traditional telephony to accommodate their ever-increasing rollout of satellite dental clinics. They had been using a standard TDM phone system which meant skyrocketing telephony costs.

Kool Smiles transitioned its nationwide network of dental practices and call center-to-SIP trunks, which rapidly reduced costs by eliminating the need for an enterprise PSTN gateway, unused BRI/PRI capacity, expensive and underutilized phone lines or trunks at remote offices, and by providing PSTN termination in the local area.

They deployed a new 3Com VCX IP-PBX (News - Alert) paired with an Ingate SIP-capable security device with SIP trunking capabilities at Kool Smiles’ headquarters. The edge device makes it possible to connect their 3Com (News - Alert) VCX IP-PBX to their Internet telephony service provider’s SIP trunk by solving the Network Address Translation (NAT) traversal issues and interoperability concerns with the protocol all while maintaining the security and integrity of their network. The result was a 40 percent reduction of communications costs, with the complete installation, including a new IP-PBX, phones, network upgrades and the edge device solution, paying for itself in less than twelve months.

The speed with which Kool Smiles achieved payback, and the magnitude of its Return on Investment (ROI) was astonishing to Kool Smiles’ management team, which had thought there might have been a “glitch” in the cost projections. In actuality, the investment did pay for itself that quickly; ongoing communications costs were going to be that low.

SIP trunking offers businesses a quick, effective way to slash costs — a critical advantage in today’s tough economy. IT

Steven Johnson (News - Alert) is President of Ingate® Systems (www.ingate.com).

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