VoIP, network overhaul brings hospital savings, unified communications

Sesto checked out Siemens, Cisco and Avaya VoIP systems. The Siemens system was being pushed by PosTrack, which also supplies Siemens medical gear to Ottawa Health. It was the only bidder that urged a data network evaluation as the first step in the process of moving to VoIP, he says. He liked that and also the fact that the Siemens offer was a hosted service. It would take on the task of network monitoring and maintenance, which frees up two to three full-timers who can focus instead on implementing electronic medical records systems, another priority for the center.

So the first step became upgrading the all-Cisco 10/100 Ethernet network that lacked power over Ethernet except to support the Cisco wireless access points, Sesto says. Design considerations included a fiber ring to improve building-to-building connections. After bid from Juniper undercut Cisco's $1 million bid by $350,000, Juniper won the deal, he says.

PosTrack installed 3 miles of fiber among the buildings on the Ottawa Health campus and rewired all the buildings with 400,000 feet of Cat 6 cable, replacing the old cabling that was half Cat 5 and half Cat 3.

Voice traffic will run over the same network. The voice system is based on Siemens OpenScape servers located at two separate sites in Chicago for redundancy in case one goes down. The campus fiber loop ties in to the servers over a 10Gbps fiber link pieced together and managed by PosTrack. It consists of a 30-mile connection over the local Medicacom cable TV network to the state run Illinois Century Network that is available to hospitals to the Level 3 points of presence.

The link supports 10G bps, but the medical center uses just 15Mbps. Of that, 10Mbps is dedicated to voice and has a high quality of service. The other 5Mbps is for data and has a lower QoS, he says. Whenever Ottawa Health needs more bandwidth, it can buy it in chunks of 5Mbps that can be turned up quickly by changing settings in the infrastructure, he says.