She needed a "secure network, and we didn't want a series of point-to-point connections between the hospitals--pretty soon, we'd have had a grid of criss-crossing T-1s between the hospitals," she says. Instead, she wanted them all connected to a "cloud," so each hospital would have a T-1 connected to the MPLS network. "When the [Cisco CallManager] software sets up a call, it determines where the call should be routed, and the two hospitals link in an ad hoc, point-to-point connection," Paras says.
Challenges Ahead
Developing a call center that could handle both audio- and videoconferencing, as well as route calls between hospitals, was the most important and difficult part of the process. "We didn't have a model of how to build this," Paras says. "We weren't looking to be first in anything but, as we began building what we thought we needed, we couldn't find anyone who had done it before."
For instance, there were no widely accepted techniques for linking the Cisco Unified Contact Center Express product to the various videoconferencing stations within the three hospitals, she says. Most notably, Paras ran into problems related to Network Address Translation (NAT), in which the firewalls at each hospital essentially "hid" the videoconference stations from those at the other hospitals. Paras lucked out, however, and discovered a Cisco gold partner, Quest Systems in Sacramento, that had worked with another Bay Area hospital to resolve similar problems. Says Paras, "We developed a work-around to get things temporarily working, knowing that Cisco was about to release an upgrade to its firewall that would allow [video] transversal of the network."
Dealing with cautious systems administrators at each hospital was another barrier. They were reluctant to connect their networks to external sources, no matter how trustworthy the sources. "It's their jobs to protect their networks," Paras says.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
