As Northamptonshire’s local sight loss charity, NAB provides advice, support, and products to help visually impaired people live life to the full. They do this through their empathy, experience, and expertise. Barton Telecom have had an affiliation with the Northamptonshire Association for the Blind for 30+ years, starting with our Managing Director Mark Zok who looked after the site during his early BT days. When Barton Telecom was founded in 1995, the NAB were one of the first customers to come on board.
NAB were running on an old Toshiba CIX 100 telephone system that was installed around 10 years ago when they move into their premises. Over time the Toshiba phone system became more difficult to manage due to the redundancy of the Toshiba telecoms market after it’s take over from Mitel in 2017.
Once the Covid Pandemic hit in early 2020, the customer soon came to realise that their current phone system was no longer up to scratch as it didn’t enable smart working, and this was beginning to cause some major issues. The customer was already running on a CityFibre leased line, so the infrastructure was already in place to migrate their phone system into the cloud.
We sat down with the customer to grasp the full issues and how we can resolve them. For us, the answer was simple. We needed to migrate them to a VoIP cloud phone system. The VoIP cloud system was going to enable them to introduce a streamlined home working environment taking advantage of the mobile and PC softphones, which were including in the bundle. We also installed various Yealink T54w phones which gives the customer plenty of facilities and a large colour screen for ease of use.
The customer has now been able to distribute mobile and PC softphones to users who require home working or smart working. While also having a phone system in place which is easy to manage for any changes. Another advantage of the NAB migrating to a VoIP phone system is that they will no longer be affected by the ISDN/PSTN switch off at the end of 2025.