When the Observatory began looking for a new telephony solution they had three critical issues: First, being as far away from base they had to have a system that was not only simple to maintain but in the event of severe hardware failure could be built from scratch by the ship’s engineer without any communication to shore for assistance.
Second, as the ship moved about from port to port they needed to be able easily set-up trunks with new service providers; and finally they needed a broader feature set including the ability to deal with which users could use which trunk as the ship passed through satellite coverage areas offering varying cost / quality options. Proprietary Systems were often able to offer complicated redundancy but would require proprietary parts that were not commonly found far off the Alaskan Coast.
These systems also depended heavily upon dedicated resellers to service them which again were unlikely to be available if needed. The setting up of trunks has traditionally required considerable experience. Each trunk provider has slightly different requirements that have to be met perfectly for the trunk to function. Depending upon bandwidth requirements there are also a wide variety of Codec options. The ship would need to vary these according to port and satellite conditions on a regular basis without the assistance of a reseller but relying on its own engineers.
Voicemails, IVRs, Conferences were all expected as standard inclusive features. The ship knew however that the systems administrator would need a detailed control of privileges each user should have. According to these settings privileges different users would or not be able to select from a variety of trunks with varying bandwidth, quality and cost factors that changed as the ship passed in and out of different port-based or satellite trunk providers’ coverage areas.