Lotus drives down costs with 3CX IP telephony deployment

Lotus adopts the position with 3CX

When the Lotus Racing team was accepted into the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) Formula 1 (F1) World Championship in September last year, its IT team knew its communications infrastructure needed a significant upgrade. For one thing, it expected the 25-strong team to swell to as many as 200 before its first Championship season since 1994 got under way.

The Lotus team quickly realised that the old NEC hardware PBX communications system it inherited when it moved into its headquarters in Hingham, Norfolk, last year was not adequate to support it throughout the Championship.

Lotus Racing head of IT Bill Peters said: “NEC's system didn’t have enough capacity, had prohibitive maintenance costs, and limited functionality.”

The team eventually opted for the Windows-based 3CX Phone System Enterprise Edition 8 because it needed to set up VoIP connectivity to all the race venues in a short space of time.

"We came to the grid quite late, and we had only six months to get everything into place," explained Peters.

As the 3CX runs on industry-standard Windows servers, Lotus knew it already had the necessary skills to support it.

The system is used with a Patton primary rate interface (PRI) gateway, session initiation protocol (SIP) trunks and 130 Cisco shared port adapter (SPA) IP phones.

It uses Lotus' existing network infrastructure, to connect user's IP phones via Dell’s power-over-Ethernet (PoE) switches – this gives one network port per user.

Additionally, the PC and the phone run off the same network connection.

"Aside from being easy to roll out, the system affords many other benefits, such as presence indication and call status on desktop PC," said Peters.

Lotus performed a full rollout of the system across its Norfolk factory in February this year.

A second phase of the communications rollout was carried out alongside the track in Bahrain in April. The system connected the remote PABX system to a multi-protocol label switched (MPLS) circuit, meaning users can dial out to anywhere in the world.

The MPLS circuit is a 2Mbit/s connection using quality of service (QoS) technology that prioritises data.

"There are times when IP voice gets priority over the circuit, and other times when data gets priority – for example at the end of practice sessions, when we need to get data back to headquarters quickly," said Peters.

Lotus makes considerable cost savings as a result of avoiding high mobile phone costs and roaming charges; it also saves money in management by comparison with other systems because the system is hosted on an un-virtualised hardware server, and managed as a Windows application.

In the future, Lotus aims to use wireless DECT phones with its system, and Peters explained that the team's plans don't stop there: “Although we haven’t got full unified communications yet, we'll be rolling out Microsoft’s Office Communications Server system, and also implementing desktop conferencing over the coming months."

Lotus is preparing to do battle this weekend in the first European leg of the F1 World championship to take place in Barcelona.