Cordless Phone Network At Berkeley Sports
Illawarra Mercury
Monday June 30, 1997
Accent Communications has installed a cordless telephone network at Berkeley Sports and Social Club and will soon begin an even larger installation at Port Kembla.
Accent Communications director and general manager Ian Gregory said the Berkeley Sports and Social Club system involved 11 mobile handsets, six base stations and covered not only duty managers working inside the club building, but also staff maintaining and supervising the adjacent bowling greens and the football field.
The Port Kembla installation will involve 80 handsets and 16 base stations within a major manufacturing site and will produce substantial savings on mobile phone and pager costs.
Depending on the environment in which they are operated, the cordless handsets have a 200m coverage from base stations.
The system could produce benefits for hundreds of Illawarra organisations, such as manufacturing, service and medical industries, where staff were constantly on the move, Mr Gregory said.
By Christmas dual handsets will be available to work on cordless networks as well as provide access to the mobile networks.
The dual system represented a further step towards the concept of total mobility where people could be contacted by phone no matter where they were, Mr Gregory said.
He said the cordless or radio phone exchange technology would help overcome the situation within some firms where 70 per cent of telephone calls did not reach the called party at first attempt.
The main reason for this was that employees were just not close to their office handset for much of their working day.
Mr Gregory said the Ericsson Business Phone Cordless PABX systems his company was installing interfaced with the traditional PABX to provide a fully featured office telephone with the convenience of cordless operation for up to 600 portable handsets.
The system gave signal quality equal to the standard desktop phone because technology installed in each handset constantly searched and switched to the strongest signal.
Digital encryption of the radio signals protected the network against eavesdropping, he said.
"Today we realise the importance of being contactable while mobile. That is evident by the vast number of business people using mobile phones. With the new system it is as though staff are always at their desks. Productivity increases as key personnel are always contactable no matter where they are in the workplace," Mr Gregory said.
Accent Communications, which began trading in 1989, now has 24 staff specialising in total telecommunications solutions.
The company, a former Illawarra Service Industry of the Year award winner, recently gained ISO 9002 accreditation.
Accent Communications now does substantial business in Sydney as well as in its traditional territory south to Batemans Bay and on the Southern Highlands.
Mr Gregory said Accent had tendered for Olympic projects, but suggested the specialist installations and commissioning services it could provide would not be needed on site for another two years.
© 1997 Illawarra Mercury
