How Businesses Can Manage Safety Needs During the Transition to Packet Networks

The last blog of this series offered an overview of how traditional analog telephone networks (Plain Old Telephone Service or POTS) are being retired and noted steps customers can take to maintain critical services during the transition. In this post, we’ll dig deeper and review an industry example of how a large service company worked with Sangoma and a solution provider in order to preserve their current investment in safety devices and migrated to a more modern packet network.

Challenges

This US company has thousands of storefronts and multiple distribution centers to provide service to customers and relies upon safety devices that have connected to monitoring systems using traditional POTS telephone lines. Major telecom providers are now phasing out these analog phone lines, so the company needed a cost-effective solution to continue to support these safety functions while integrating their control systems via modern Internet Protocols and Mobile Networks. The company’s storefronts often have security devices such as gates, alarm panels, call boxes and other devices which are essential to their business operations. The fire or alarm panels need to periodically connect to centralized monitoring systems. The company’s distribution centers have an even wider assortment of safety and security devices, along with elevators for their multi-story buildings.

Path to a Solution

The customer contacted 10T Solutions, a Sangoma partner, which has substantial experience as an integrator in developing customized solutions using technologies used in the Internet of Things (IoT) and Telecommunications. Working with the customer, 10T identified the need to continue support for a variety of safety devices such as gates, alarms, doors and elevators which historically connected to analog phone lines in order to be managed by a variety of control systems. In order to meet these challenges, 10T Solutions needed a telecommunications equipment partner that had expertise in connecting to analog telephone devices and could also integrate to the SIP trunking technology that is now being widely deployed in the United States. Since the applications involved data connections, 10T solutions contacted Sangoma, a company that has deep experience in utilizing data modem technologies over both legacy and SIP networks. 10T Solutions developed a customized solution for the customer which used the Sangoma Vega 60G Gateway in either 4 or 8 port configurations to provide conversions between the analog safety devices or panels used by the customers and the SIP protocol used by the service providers. The solution also included 10T’s 5G-capable LTE (Long Term Evolution) routers, which can interconnect with multiple cellular providers using either a direct IP connection, typically via Ethernet, or 4G LTE and 5G.

The Results

The service company has been able to successfully use their existing safety devices and utilize a customized solution comprised of a Vega 60 Gateway, a 10T LTE router and a backup battery to connect via Internet or Mobile networks to centralized monitoring devices. The solution can be scaled for both small locations such as storefronts and larger locations such as distribution centers. By using this solution, the customer has been able to utilize their current array of safety and security devices and maintain connections to a variety of centralized monitoring solutions which confirm that the safety devices are active and still working properly. The deep knowledge of analog networks, data modem communications and integration to SIP networks provided by the Vega 60G analog gateways has been a key element enabling both backward and forward compatibility with the customer’s on-premise safety equipment and the centralized systems used by the customer for monitoring the health and activity of their safety equipment.

Resources & Next Steps

To understand in more detail how the Vega 60G Gateway can be configured to effectively support such safety solutions, please refer to the Application Note entitled: Using Sangoma Vega 60G Gateway for Migrating POTS Services. In order to take full advantage of Sangoma’s capabilities to enable successful migration of services from traditional phone networks to the latest mobile and fixed line IP networks, contact your Sangoma sales representative or channel partner.