XMediusFAX^® SP enhances MTI’s IP telephony services and generates new revenue

The Client

Mountain Telecommunications, Inc. (MTI), headquartered in Tempe, Arizona, is a locally owned, facilities-based Competitive Local Exchange Carrier (CLEC) serving business, government and educational organizations throughout the State of Arizona.

MTI is dedicated to providing superior-quality local voice and data, long-distance, Internet, wireless and private-line transport to customers requiring optimum performance and reliability. MTI has connected more than 12,000 lines of direct-end, office trunking to more than 80 central offices throughout Arizona.

The Challenge

In partnership with Cisco Systems and Nortel Networks, MTI offers advanced IP telephony services through its Hosted IP Telephony Service (HITS). HITS enables customers to pay a monthly fee for all communications services – including an office phone system, as well as Internet-based email, voice and fax services.

MTI was looking for a carrier-class Fax over IP (FoIP) solution to complement its HITS service, which is based on Cisco CallManager, Cisco Unity and VoIP. In theme with MTI’s dedication to 7x24x365 customer service, and a 99.999 level of reliability for uptime and quality of services, the FoIP solution was expected to offer the same high levels of standard. The solution needed to be user-friendly, secure, reliable, fault-tolerant and highly scalable to MTI’s expanding customer base. It also required Java API/Web provisioning to accommodate new subscribers, support for multiple T1s of fax transmission on a single server, and compatibility with MTI’s Cisco and Nortel backbone.

A multi-tenant, FoIP solution would be the ideal solution to service MTI’s staff, plus three of MTI’s main customer sites in Arizona. The system would support 400 fax users. It would therefore require 24 fax channels, since each site typically processes an average of 150 inbound/outbound faxes per day.

The Solution

MTI explored various fax server solutions on the market, including Captaris RightFax, Biscom Faxcom, and Sagem-Interstar’s XMediusFAX. The company also considered reselling some existing hosted fax solutions from providers like Efax.com and Protus Virtual Fax. However, this route would not provide the flexibility MTI expected, nor the revenues and margins it could generate from hosting its own system.

Sagem-Interstar’s XMediusFAX SP was singled-out as the premier choice. MTI selected XMediusFAX SP since it is the market’s only FoIP solution with multi-tenant support. This enables the partitioning of MTI’s VoIP network into hundreds virtual fax servers, each with their own settings, queues and administrators.

Results and Benefits

For MTI, the migration from conventional fax machines to an IP telephony infrastructure produced dramatic improvements in terms of telecom sales, productivity and cost-reduction.

Business is growing quickly, and XMediusFAX SP is poised to easily accommodate MTI for all future growth.

XMediusFAX SP’s highly scalable technology is designed for 25,000+ users. Fax transactions are centrally archived in an SQL database that can be scaled to support millions of inbound and outbound entries.

“We have just turned up three more major companies with IP services including fax. With growth of sales, we may have to expand the system soon,” said Bob Maldonado, IP System Engineer at MTI.