Offshore Drillers Keep In Touch With VoIP Print E-mail
Written by Adam Gosling   
Wednesday, 27 September 2006
Mitel has landed a contract to supply an IP Telephony platform to five rigs and associated satellite offices for Stena Drilling, one of the world's leading drilling contractors.

The core platform is already in place at the company's Aberdeen headquarters as the first stage in a planned global roll-out. The sites, in Asia, Australia, Africa and elsewhere will be installed and supported by a company called Nessco, a Mitel Platinum Solution provider.

In the next six months Mitel IP wireless phones will be rolled out to Stena Drilling's five fully submersible rigs and its new mobile rig - Drill Max.

The Mitel 3300 IP Communications Platform (ICP) with IP-DECT handsets will deliver wireless communication to the oil rigs as part of a drive by the drilling company to improve business processes and bring its telecommunications in-house to replace a managed service.

Sharon McLaughlin, IT manager at Stena Drilling, said: "We struggled for months with our old PBX system, which lacked the level of flexibility we required. Our drilling rigs frequently move and we need a system that allows us to adapt our telephony systems quickly and easily.

"Previously we were constrained by our traditional system and often found ourselves waiting days for an engineer to re-programme headsets and telephone ports, which was neither cost-effective or time efficient.

"We had also become frustrated that our old system didn't support the video conferencing equipment we had invested in.  We now have the flexibility to make moves, adds and changes ourselves and can integrate new applications quickly and easily," she said.

The company is hoping for "a considerable reduction in cost and time spent on external engineers" as a result of the new solution.

It's got more ambitious plans for the future though and expects to implement mobile support at the rigs so that senior managers - who frequently travel between sites and work from home - to  be able to use the IP communications platform seamlessly.

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