10/08-04   -   Pressmeddelande

Swiss Radio and Television to Enter Summer Olympics 2004 With innovaphone IP Telephony Solutions

Swiss Radio and Television to Enter Summer Olympics 2004 With innovaphone IP Telephony Solutions.

Sindelfingen, August 9, 2004 - The Swiss Radio and Television Company (SRG SSR) will enter this year´s Summer Olympics with innovaphone IP telephony solutions.

When the 28th modern Olympic Games are inaugurated on August 13, and about 140 on-site employees of the Alps Republic´s largest broadcasting family reach for their phones in Athens, all calls to the Zurich headquarters will be handled by state-of-the-art technology based on the Internet protocol. For the third time running, the Swiss broadcasting company place their trust in technology from Sindelfingen for their coverage of Olympic Games. For the first time during the Summer Olympics in 2000 in Sydney, followed by the Winter Olympics 2002 in Salt Lake City, innovaphone was the partner of choice for SRG SSR, providing state-of-the-art IP telephony solutions.

This year´s Olympics in the Greek capital will be a real trial - not only for the roughly 10,500 athletes who will be competing for medals at over 40 degrees Celsius, but also for well over 25,000 media representatives and technicians who will be working behind the scenes to guarantee that everything runs smoothly. Under these extreme conditions, the advantages of IP telephony can prove its full potential of advantages over traditional landline telephony, regarding flexibility as well as easy and comfortable administration.

The SRG SSR Olympics team alone consists of a staff of more than 140. During the 14 days of the Summer Olympics, 40 employees deliver radio and television audiences in Switzerland with news and features in four languages, directly from the International Broadcasting Center (IBC) in Athens. The entire telephone coordination with the Zurich headquarters is handled via the data network.

A total of 14 Voice-over IP gateways and 30 to 40 IP- and ISDN phones guarantee the flawless connection between the broadcasting company´s head office and the Olympics team on site. Two IP400 gateways in each location (Zurich and Athens) will be connected for the entire duration of the Summer Games through a 2MBit/s dedicated line. AN IP800 gateway then hands the calls over to the Swiss public telephony network. The other VoIP gateways connect remote SRG SSR locations on site to the speech/data network.

As soon as the network is established, the IP telephones can be connected and configurated easily through a Web browser. In less than 10 minutes, all employees on site in Athens will be available to their colleagues in Switzerland through their usual extension numbers - the staff just take their phone numbers with them. An additional advantage of IP telephony over landline telephony: It is highly scalable. While the Swiss broadcasting company´s ISDN system is limited to 24 channels, the IP-based telephony system can be expanded to an unlimited number of channels.

"In this business, you have to be flexible," says Thomas Meier, in charge of the technical processing of SRG SRR´s entire visual-, audio- and data transmission service between Switzerland and Athens. "The main advantage of IP telephony is its scalability. Our ISDN system would long have reached its limits, but with innovaphone´s IP telephony system, we can adjust the dimensions easily to the requirements on site," Thomas Meier explains, "and there are no high fixed-step costs to consider, as there would be with a traditional telephony system."

A direct comparison of the economic data also turns out clearly in favor of IP technology: Since all speech transmissions are handled via the data network, the extra wiring required by traditional landline telephony is rendered obsolete by IP telephony. Another cost-saving factor is IP telephony´s easy and uncomplicated administration. Furthermore, the telephone charges are kept low, as the time switch does not start until the calls are forwarded to the local landlines. Since all calls between Athens and Zurich are handled through the 2Mbit/s dedicated line, both sides will only have to pay telephone charges for local calls.

This type of cost-optimized IP-based telephone call routing is what experts call "least cost routing". And even though the telephone charges have dropped considerably in the past: With 40 lines at the Olympic location and over 10 hours of calling time per line, the costs saved by this technology are significant.

Dagmar Geer, Executive at innovaphone AG, believes that it is only a matter of time until the "plain old telephony system," as traditional landline telephony is already being dubbed, is replaced entirely by IP telephony. "IP telephony is currently on the threshold to the mass market," says Geer. "As far as reliability, availability, and speech quality go, Voice-over IP is already up to par with landline telephony."

Projects like the equipment of SRG SSR for the Summer Olympics should not obliterate the fact that in many companies, Voice over IP is already an established reality - often without the employees even noticing. "Landline telephony has had a headstart, but its advantage is continually shrinking," says Dagmar Geer, "sooner or later, Voice-over IP will come up first.