Apparently, we are no longer knocking at the door of the information era: we have, believe it or not, crossed its threshold – such was the claim of GEC Plessey Telecommunications Ltd’s presentation at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London on Monday (CI No 1,280). After the revelation of this fact by Maggie Philbin, presenter of BBC TV’s science programme Tomorrow’s World, and after the fit-inducing graphics and euphoric synthesiser music increasingly in evidence at such events, guests were invited to step into this new age to examine the newly-enhanced iSDX private branch exchange from the Nottingham-based firm. The digital voice-data exchange, still built around an 80186 processor with 64Kb of memory – there are plans to increase this to 512Kb next year – has undergone a number of changes which GEC Plessey feels are necessary to maintain its hold on the UK market, as well as finding more success abroad. Improvements to the hardware are based on the company’s belief that what customers are looking for is not necessarily an increase in the amount of extensions available this currently stands at around 2,000 – but an increased switched traffic capacity on each terminal, and greater trunking and digital terminal capability. Accordingly, the telephony shelves have new interfaces, bus cables, bus terminators and digital switch controllers, making for an increased operating speed of 8Mbps. What all this amounts to, says GEC Plessey is greater Erlang-cost efficiency – an Erlang being the measurement of switched traffic capacity – so that, during the two or three hours a day when PABXs really earn their keep, the new capacity of over 900 Erlangs will enable just one operator to deal with all calls, using the new screen-based console. Greater functionality has been afforded by a new software package, the in-house developed Revision 3.5: least cost routing through either British Telecommunications Plc or Mercury Communications lines is included, with direct access to the Mercury 2200 service possible without the Smartbox adaptor currently required; trunk queuing, route restriction and a digital route request feature, allowing the user to choose a 64Kbps speech path, are also available. Other features include a paging facility, a voice messaging system enabling messages to be left in a centralised mailbox, and various enhancements aimed specifically at the company’s customer base in the hotel business. The UK will still be the main market for the enhanced system, but Brian Meade, director of GEC Plessey’s Business Systems Group, says a restructuring of export strategy is being carried out, with the company looking to form new partnerships abroad, similar to the collaboration in the UK with Cable & Wireless Plc’s Telephone Rentals unit, British Telecom and Hull Telephone Co – at the moment, ground presence in countries such as France – where the firm’s initialised name causes uncontrollable giggles – is not enough to carry out an effective service in labour-intensive areas such as support: an example of the type of relationship GEC Plessey is eager to nurture is the present association with Nokia in Finland. – Mark John
