The government of the province of Ontario, Canada, has nearly 70,000 direct, full-time employees working for its ministries and agencies, including the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP). These workers are distributed across the geographically large province, in some 2,000 buildings, serving the population of approximately 11 million citizens. In the early 1990s the provincial government had a policy of moving some large ministerial head offices out of Toronto to other cities, in order to provide steady employment in those regional locations. For example, the Ministry of Transportation is based in the city of St. Catharines and the OPP's headquarters are now located in the town of Orillia. The cities mentioned in this report are shown on the provincial map in Figure 1.
More recently, the government has moved various small offices housing a series of different agencies into a number of consolidated locations, while relying on toll-free numbers, public electronic kiosks, and Internet access to deliver local services. These major moves have greatly increased the province's reliance on telecommunications, especially messaging and teleconferencing.
Outsourcing
During the last 3 years, the government has outsourced most of the management and systems administration of its data and voice networks to contractors, under the overall coordination of EDS. The province was driven to this solution in part due to significant issues in hiring and retaining the required number of competent telecom and IT professionals on government salary scales.
In mid-2000 AT&T Canada was awarded a multiyear contract to provide outbound, switched voice and data services at extremely low rates, which led to much voice traffic being taken off the leased-line Government of Ontario Network (GOnet).
Telephone Services and Systems
For 2 decades, the government of Ontario acquired new telephone services and systems with a focus on individual cost/value, rather than on compatibility with existing systems. In the mid 1990s, the government had more than 40 types of PBXs and KTS in service. As the year 2000 approached, many older KTS and some obsolete PBXs were replaced due to concerns related to both compatibility and Y2K issues between telephone switches and voice mail systems. The replacement program resulted in the narrowing of system types, leaving no more than a dozen different models of phone switches in use by the government, with clusters of certain manufacturers' systems in specific cities within the province (e.g., Siemens/ROLM in Kingston and Mitel in Ottawa). Recently, Avaya Definity systems have become prominent for new contact center implementations.
The government's mid-2000 telecom inventory showed a total of approximately 80,000 desktop phones, of which 35,500 are attached to Centrex circuits. Centrex services, provided by Bell Canada, are used by most provincial employees in the cities of Toronto, Guelph, London, and Peterborough (see Figure 5.3). Some 10,000 of the phones attached to KTS are in small rural offices that, due to seasonal workload, remain quiet for a portion of the year; hence we estimate that the Centrex lines actually carry more than 60% of all voice traffic minutes processed by government departments. It is interesting to note that 85% of the phones in provincial offices are served by Nortel switches (Centrex, KTS, or PBX).
Voice Messaging
The government of Ontario has achieved considerably more standardization with voice processing systems than it did with telephone switches. Over 90% of all voice mailboxes are Lucent systems, linked to Centrex services or government-owned PBXs. In Toronto the government owns 10 Lucent systems that are collocated in Bell Canada buildings, adjacent to the DMS-100 switches that deliver Centrex. These systems have an average of 72 ports and up to 390 hours of voice message storage. A similar collocation arrangement exists for the government with Bell's Centrex switches in the cities of Guelph and Peterborough (with 36 ports and 60 hours each). In other locations, the province rents Centrex-linked voice mailboxes on a contractual basis.
Software from Lucent is used to enable the Voicenet service, linking all of the Lucent-based voice mailboxes throughout the provincial government, whether the user's telephone is served through Centrex or by an Avaya, Mitel, Nortel, or Siemens PBX. Voicenet is very valuable to most provincial employees as an easy-to-use, everywhere-available service parallel to e-mail.
Distributed Contact Center
In 2001, an agency of the provincial government implemented a contact center, which employs a number of agents who are scattered, in small groups, in a number of offices across Ontario. This contact center is based on an Avaya Definity G3 switch, with ACD (including agent skills routing), and uses a number of IP telephony features. An attached Octel (model 250) messaging system, with 12 ports and 70 hours of voice/fax storage, is also part of the center. Up to 100 agents and supervisors have Avaya's IP agent software, which provides a PC-based softphone.
The Avaya and Octel systems are located in an office building in midtown Toronto, together with approximately 50% of the agents. Agents log into the ACD over the government's IP LAN/WAN, with the agent software requiring a maximum bit rate of 8 Kbps to set up and maintain each two-way call. Voice calls are routed from the Definity Enhanced Communication System (ECS) over the PSTN to remote agents using Centrex, DID on a PBX, or a regular business line (1FL) at the agent end. Home-based agents can be incorporated into this distributed contact center with very little difficulty.
A number of primary rate ISDN links are attached to the Definity switch (providing up to 119 B channels), because two voice lines are needed for each active incoming call that is extended over the PSTN for a remote agent. The system is licensed to have 50 simultaneously active agents.
This contact center incurs long-distance charges to its remote agents, for about one-half of the total call volume. The government is paying less than 4 cents per minute for its provincewide toll voice service, so this cost is significant, but not prohibitive. The hybrid IP/TDM solution clearly made the best use of the technology that was available at the time of its cutover, but could be made more cost-effective and flexible when it becomes feasible to transfer the contact center to a wholly IP-Centrex network.
Effectiveness of Centrex
Government telecom managers consider that Centrex delivers an effective service to its users, at a per-line cost of around 50% of the one-month, single-line tariff. Centrex is not used for ACD in contact centers, and, therefore, the Ministry of Finance is unique within the government in being directly responsible for several large PBXs and making little use of Centrex. The widespread use of Centrex is consistent with the government's policy of outsourcing services and is helped by satisfaction with Bell Canada's management of the service.
The government has implemented extended Ethernet VLANs between most of its offices throughout Toronto using DWDM over dedicated optical fiber pairs. A reasonable amount of fiber is available in most urban centers in Ontario because of competition between the electrical power distributors (e.g., Toronto Hydro), cable TV carriers, and several telcos. With these circumstances it will be logical to install interbuilding VLANs in other cities across the province.
As the government of Ontario establishes well-managed broadband networks in urban areas throughout the province and continues to require telephone and data services in over 1,000 buildings, it will become a natural and ideal candidate for the widespread implementation of IP-Centrex, which we expect will replace the older PBXs and many KTS over the corning 5 years.
Technology Trial
The provincial government participated in a limited technology trial of IP-Centrex in the spring of 2002. The duration of this trial was constrained due to the so-called gating requirements of Nortel Networks' schedule, as the manufacturer moved the product through its development and testing stages to market availability.
Some 30 government employees at one building in downtown Toronto used Nortel i2004 sets on their desks and softphones in their PCs for the 90-day test. The IP-Centrex service was delivered over a Fast Ethernet LAN, which had no native QoS capabilities. The coordinator of this trial reported that, on some conversations between the IP phones and off-Centrex callers, there was "clipping" of the voice signals, making the line sound as though it were set up in half duplex mode.
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