Telstra claims Australia's largest hosted IP telephony rollout

Stephen Withers
Friday, 19 December 2008 08:12

Business IT - Technology

Telstra says its 10,000-service internal IP telephony installation is the largest in the country. An example of eating your own dogfood?

The rollout provides Telstra and its partners with a proof of concept for other large organisations thinking of going down the VoIP track.

"Telstra continues to lead by example," said Paul Geason, Telstra enterprise and government executive director.

"This milestone is a compelling proof point of how Telstra is leading the market with next-generation communications services," chimed in Broadsoft president and CEO Michael Tessler.

Polycom's vice president of marketing, voice communications solutions vice president, Chalan Aras, rounded out the mutual admiration society's chorus with "The success of the [Telstra IP telephony] service exemplifies the rising demand for IP telephony worldwide."

He added that the Telstra rollout was one of the largest handset deployments in the world for Polycom.

Like most VoIP systems, Telstra's setup includes integration with desktop applications (in this case with Outlook and Internet Explorer) as well as with the corporate directory.

Though it's not exactly state of the art, as Telstra product management executive director Philip Jones conceded that the "unified communication solution will soon be enhanced with new functionality including seamless integration with Microsoft Office Communicator and video calling."

Telstra's IP telephony service operates over the company's Next IP network. Replacing parallel voice and data networks is said to provide an opportunity for cost savings as well as improved efficiency and productivity.