RAD’s Pseudowire Gateways Reduce Communications Costs

Yorkshire Water has won many awards for customer service and holds the British government's Charter Mark for Service Excellence. In 2006, they were voted utility company of the year for an unprecedented third consecutive year, finishing ahead of all other water, gas, electricity, and telecoms companies in the United Kingdom.

Pursuing further efficiencies, Yorkshire Water looked for a way to retain their proven voice switches and reduce leased line costs. The first steps in 2003 involved the elimination of a number of costly 2 Mbps lines by carrying voice traffic over their own packet-switched core network.

Two PABXs were connected to RAD Data Communications' IPmux-1 TDM over IP (TDMoIP®) pseudowire gateways, which convert synchronous TDM voice and signalling traffic into packets for transmission over IP or any other packet-switched infrastructure. To facilitate this transmission, Yorkshire Water commissioned RAD distribution partner Open Networks Engineering to provide the expertise on how to carry voice traffic over an IP network. “This working relationship with Open Networks has supported our systems convergence transformation,” said Steve Groves, Senior Network Analyst at YW. “The business case to eliminate our expensive leased lines, which we used to carry voice, and migrate traffic to our existing IP data network, was compelling,” added Matthew Rowe, Senior Network Analyst at YW.

Migrating to an MPLS Network
Later in 2006, when YW migrated to an MPLS network, there was a need to carry voice from their remote WANs, and the original single-port IPmux units at the central office were redeployed at these remote sites. Once again, Open Networks enabled YW to carry voice traffic over the WAN while ensuring Quality of Service (QoS). To accommodate all of the new outstations, an eight-port IPmux-8 central site aggregation solution was installed to transport traffic from multiple E1 trunks over the packet-based network. Open Networks helped again by introducing an echo canceller to further enhance voice quality in all inbound and outbound calls throughout the system.