Castle goes high-tech with IP

Hever Castle was once home to Henry VIII's wife Anne Boleyn. Now it's home to the latest in comms technology including IP phones and wi-fi.

With a complex that spans 600 acres including conference facilities, gardens, a golf club and accommodation, the lack of connectivity across the castle grounds had become a problem.

Two of the business units were almost operating as completely separate companies with independent infrastructures and the castle needed to do something about it, opting to connect its golf club with the main campus building using optical fibre and structured cabling.

Given we were going to be having major disruption with digging up two or three miles of trenching, we took the opportunity to look at IP telephony.

With the campus all connected up, Hever was then able to roll out real-time management tools. Aside from a better view across the business, it also found itself with faced with new possibilities around IP.

David James, finance director at Hever Castle, told silicon: "As part of the process of tendering, we noticed the Meridian [the Nortel PBX] was not out of date but getting a bit long in the tooth. Given we were going to be having major disruption with digging up two or three miles of trenching, we took the opportunity to look at IP telephony."

BT installed Cisco and Nortel kit and unified the voice and data network. There are now 16 seats running over IP which the castle has been trialling for around a year and hopes to roll out further soon, when budgets allow.

James said: "We've got a watching brief on where it's going. We're happy with the solid base - it's proved itself. We got the quality of service issues sorted fairly quickly and now it's as good as a landline."

Convergence has also seen the addition of a new electronic-point-of-sale system, which cuts out the need for staff to rekey data from the system into the company's accountancy package. The new unified network also allowed for the introduction of the campus' wi-fi network.

Hever is looking even further ahead to new technologies with electronic information kiosks on the agenda. James said: "It's opened up a whole new avenue of what we can do. We weren't initially looking at information kiosks but now we can run them off our IT infrastructure."

While new services are on the horizon, return on investment will be making an appearance sooner than predicted. He added: "We expect payback in less than two years but we may end up paying it back slightly quicker."