Acme Electronics

ACME Electronics is a medium size business specializing in Lighting controls and systems. Acme’s main clients are consumers of Home Improvement outlets and Installing Electrical Contractors. This company has recently decided to upgrade the intercommunications network. This memo will highlight the advantages as well as disadvantages of the system chosen to be installed.

The system chosen to replace the legacy PBX switching system will be the NEC’s NEAX 2000 IPS. The headquarters of ACME Electronics is spread between four buildings. The NEC NEAX 2000 IPS supports distributed processor architecture. This means that the processing requirements of the system are shared between more than processor. This allows for faster response times and redundant operation. If one processor fails, the other can take over. Two of the four buildings are equipped with 1 Pentium 200 MHz Processor dedicated to the inter-communications system.

The main advantage of using this system is that is supports voice over IP (VoIP) services such as IP-Centrex. IP Centrex is a service that provides a single broadband access point to a company. The company can use this access point to broadcast packets of voice data. When no voice data is present, more bandwidth is available to other uses of the company. This results in saved money to the company because dedicated phone lines are not needed.

The new communications system will be installed using the existing cabling. The connection that will be used to tie the buildings together will use fiber as a transmission medium. Each of the four buildings is tied together using previously installed multi-mode fiber optic cable. Prior to the installation of this system, this fiber was referred to as “Dark Fiber”, meaning it was not used and therefore no light was being transmitted through it. During the construction of 2 of the 4 building, Structured Cabling was installed to facilitate future communication and data requirements.

The communications protocol that will be used for voice communications is Asynchronous Transmissions Mode, ATM. ATM is a dedicated switching method that assembles 53 byte cell frames and sends them over a physical medium using digital signal technology. ATM is Asynchronous because the cell frames are not transmitted in any sort of predetermined order. The reason ATM is so fast is primarily due to hardware such as fiber. The speed of ATM is 155.5 Mbps.

Acme Electronics is separated into many different departments. Depending on the department an employee is assigned to, the need for communications can vary. Take for example, the customer support hotline personnel. These personnel rely on a dependable phone system to route calls, manage call queues and provide reporting capabilities to management to determine the performance of the personnel. Acme Electronics has a need for approximately 4000 communication points. The use of the NEC system allows for IP Data terminal phone sets. This means that each phone is assigned a unique IP address. If an employee is moved to another part of the company, no complicated reprogramming of the phone is required. The phones are a plug and play type of device. Simply plug the phone into the appropriate jack and the phone can “self-configure”.

The NEAX 2000 supports conventional DTMF frequency tones. The purpose of DTMF tones is to give the