After Care Requirements #
You should start thinking about what you may need to put in place to prepare the customer for the change of service and to structure their post-delivery support package accordingly.
- Are there any hand-outs you could give the customer to help them to provide first-line support to their users? E.g. Handset manuals or GUI user guides.
- Are your operations teams set up to take support calls once your customer is live on the service?
- Do you need to arrange some additional assistance and support from Gamma Support? We are happy to discuss with you the possibility of arranging for a personal post-deployment manager to be on hand to assist with your customer’s early life issues and queries if required.
Collate your customer’s after-care requirements and engage the relevant parties to ensure that the after-care package is ready to trigger when required in stage 7.
What level of guidance and assistance is the customer expecting/do they need? Some relevant questions to ask at this stage are as follows:
Customer Contact | Who is the voice of the customer? Who owns the deployment of the service in the EU environment and are they prepared to manage & collate user issues in relation to the deployment? |
On-site Resource | Do they require an engineer floor-walking period post-delivery? |
Remote Assistance | Would they prefer to just shoot issues over as and when they come across them? |
Effective completion of the site survey will arm you with enough information to perform two key activities:
- Identify all work package components required in order to deploy Horizon
- Construct and confirm full and final pricing to the customer in order to obtain an agreement to proceed
Following completion of the on-site survey, you should now be armed with adequate information to begin planning your deployment schedule and organising your work packages.
The review process has been split down into the typical work packages for a Horizon deployment as follows:
Access #
Reviewing the access for the Horizon service should be your primary concern for two reasons:
- If you need to order a new service for access, this may carry a hefty lead time so the order should be submitted without delay.
- You cannot order your Horizon service or number ports until the access is in place and ready to use
Pre-requisites / Checks #
You should be attempting to place your access order without delay, however, it is important that you ensure the product you are ordering will be fit for purpose and will support the requirements of the site.
You should have captured information relating to the number of concurrent calls expected at site to enable you to calculate the required bandwidth.
It is important to bear in mind that various different user activities will utilise capacity, so when you are calculating concurrent call levels please include capacity for all the following elements as appropriate:
- External PSTN calls
- Site-to-site calls
- Voicemail access
- Instant conference groups
- Paging groups
- Video calls
- Conference calls
- Screen Sharing
To ascertain the bandwidth required, you need to perform the following simple calculation using your desired codec:
Concurrent voice calls x Codec kbps = bandwidth
If you are taking Horizon with Webex, video bandwidth is greater than voice bandwidth. Bandwidth for video are:
| Video Quality | Maximum Bandwidth |
|---|---|
High Definition | 2.5 Mbps (received) and 3.0 Mbps (send) |
High Quality | 1.0 Mbps (received) 1.5 Mbps (send) |
| Standard | 0.5 Mbps (received) and 0.5 Mbps (send) |
If you are considering using Gamma Assured services, you should run the customer site information through the Gamma Portal’s suitability checker before selecting the product to order. For full information on Gamma Data Services products please see the Broadband Accreditation on the Gamma Academy.
Distances from the exchange/line lengths may affect the available bandwidth you can achieve on these services and the suitability checker will help to flush these issues out. You can find the suitability checker on the Gamma Portal.
Gamma strongly suggests that Gamma access should be used to host Horizon services.
Not only are our services built with IP Telephony in mind and configured with all the required QoS settings and capabilities, but sourcing the access and telephony service from a single supplier makes ongoing support management far more effective.
If you are using our standard Broadband offering you will need to refer to the Network Configuration Guidelines to make sure that your customer’s network is configured correctly for Horizon.
We recommend the following Gamma access services to host Horizon:
| Product | For |
|---|---|
Assured | Smaller sites with few users |
Converged Broadband | Medium-sized sites or smaller sites that want to use one connection for voice and data services |
Ethernet | Larger sites with more users |
Third Party Access #
Clearly, we recognise that in some instances it may make sense to use an alternative supplier’s access to host Horizon and this is fine – although there are some additional considerations which need to be made in order to ensure the Horizon service will work effectively across a third party’s access. For these considerations, you should refer to the Network Configuration Guidelines.
You should ensure during the planning phase that you have access to the customer’s provider as you will need to liaise with them with regards to router settings later.
Do take into consideration that access lead times can be as long as 90 working days depending on the provider/service you are using.
You will not be able to order the Gamma Horizon service or number ports until the access is in place and ready for use.
Private Networking #
Many service providers are already interconnected directly to the Gamma network for Horizon.
You should involve the Gamma IP Pre-Sales Team to discuss a private access option if required.
Customer Premise Equipment (CPE / Router) #
Consider at this stage who is supplying/has supplied the router and ensure that you have sufficient stock allocated if you need to source it.
Review the site audit and check if there is adequate power & available space in the communications room (or equivalent area) to host the router.
If a router is coming from non-Gamma sources, ensure that you prepare the customer’s IT management that they will need to check and potentially alter some settings in the near future.
For these considerations, you should refer to the Network Configuration Guidelines.