Stuart is the owner of a fine dining restaurant located in the heart of the city. The restaurant's prestige and exclusiveness have meant that the restaurant need only rely on pre booked dinners, and that drop-ins were no longer required. Stuart's confidence in his restaurant has fuelled his decision to make the restaurant available solely by pre booking.

Stuart's booking system requires diners to book over the phone, and should the line happen to be busy, leave a voice message. The telephone system is also frequently used to order stock, confirm bookings, book taxis and for other general services.

Stuart realises that the telephone connection must be constantly working for his plans to work, and that the voice mail must be readily available. He currently has a PSTN telephone for the restaurant. 

VoIP opportunity

Stuart would like to trial a VoIP solution, as he is aware that it could be used to minimise call costs, and work as a parallel secondary phone to his current PSTN telephone. The VoIP phone would need the same capabilities as his current PSTN phone which is extremely reliable and has voicemail built in.

Solution

Stuart elected to install a hardware based VoIP box in his restaurant. The VoIP service allows staff to handle multiple bookings at once while delivering cheaper outbound calls. The service he adopted also included free voice messages.

To maintain availability, Stuart has put in place surge protection and an uninterruptable power supply (UPS). Should a power failure occur for longer than his UPS can supply, Stuart still has his PSTN line available for either incoming or outgoing calls. This backup facility allows him to call his VoIP vendor in the event of an outage. The vendor would then forward any VoIP incoming calls to the PSTN phone. Stuart also made sure that his VoIP provider allowed QoS options to be utilised on his phone, and that the phone recognised and made use of these QoS features.

As an added bonus, Stuart found that his voice messages could be checked when he was away from the restaurant phone system, either by dialing into the voice message bank, or via his email account.