Integrated data/voice saves Sager thousands - SAGER Electrical Supply Company Inc

Communications News, Feb, 1993

Sager Electrical Supply Co. is a 105-year-old distributor of electromechanical products and components. Their nine remote sites are located in Connecticut, New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Florida.

According to Electronic Buyer's News, Sager, of Hingham, Mass., is one of the top 25 electronics distributors in the country. Though they deal in a wide variety of telecomm products for voice, data and networking applications, Sager's in-house computer system was outdated and in need of an upgrade to the latest data/voice multiplexing technology.

Sager's main facility was running data and voice traffic to nine remote offices using separate communications lines. Telecomm Manager Bob McLaughlin knew it was time to look for a new solution that would take them into the 21st century and increase the value of their corporate network while reducing costs.

According to McLaughlin, the remote offices were transmitting data between terminals and a Hewlett-Packard mainframe in Hingham using data only multiplexers and 9.6 kb/s analog lines. Voice and fax traffic, transmitted via the public switched telephone network, cost the company $800 to $1,000 per month in toll charges.

Sager's upgrading began last year when it signed on with HP to install a new in-house computer system. But the time the new system took to display data on terminal screens just wasn't fast enough. "The system was so slow employees could call up data and go have a cup of coffee before it would come up," McLaughlin says.

His local telecomm distributor alerted him to a wide-area networking seminar they were hosting that week. Ken Guy, one of the seminar instructors and Micom Communication Corp.'s vice president, spent the lunch hour with McLaughlin and Data Processing Manager Peter Morris designing a solution with the Marathon data/voice multiplexing systems.

McLaughlin and Morris were impressed with the seminar material and the high quality of the live voice/data demonstration.

"I called AT&T and was pleasantly surprised to find that going with digital communications wasn't much of a price increase over analog communications," he says.

McLaughlin wanted to make an installation immediately, but there was a catch: Sager was tied into a lease with another communications equipment manufacturer. McLaughlin went to the manufacturer to price a new system and found their equipment wouldn't give him the flexibility he needed.

"At the time, the manufacturer was using someone else's voice equipment. We wouldn't have been able to operate as many data devices," McLaughlin states. After a quick review, management gave him a green light for an integrated data/voice network.

"My distributor helped us work out a deal to buy out our lease with the other manufacturer," McLaughlin says. "The cost of rolling over the lease and the existing monthly lease payment are close to what we were paying for our previous system," McLaughlin continues, "plus we get all telephone calls between remote offices for free."

Now units in each remote location integrate data/voice traffic through 56 kb/s leased lines to Hingham. Async terminals and serial printers in the remote offices can access information on Sager's host computer.

The key to Marathon's multiplexing technique is fast packet multiplexing. FPM transports a dynamic combination of voice, fax, async and sync data, and LAN traffic onto one communications channel. FPM identifies and prioritizes time-sensitive information for transmission over the network. It also eliminates the delays inherent in statistical multiplexers, resulting in superior network efficiency. In comparison, time division multiplexing (TDM) does not make unused bandwidth from inactive channels available to active channels.

In addition to FPM, Sager also benefits from voice and data compression and fax demodulation. The four combined technologies support Micom's rapid relay technology. Together they reduce the bandwidth required for data and voice transmission by a factor of 10 or higher.

By reducing bandwidth requirements, Sager's entire remote office communications now are integrated over an affordable 56 kb/s leased line.

McLaughlin notes value-added benefits as well. "It encourages communication between headquarters and our remote offices, because the calls are free," he says. He also likes the unit's programming ease. "Programming is simple. We don't have to remember specific terms like we did before," he says, "and all programming is done from our Hingham location."