A hands-off, cloud-based service that keeps people talking
Our cloud-based session border controller service is giving SOAS a resilient telephony system and helping its technical team to sleep better at night.
Like a lot of universities and colleges the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) implemented a session border controller solution to keep people communicating and working during lockdowns. But four years on, the on-premise solution was falling short of its promise. The infrastructure was on site but SOAS IT staff had no access to it or ability to manage it themselves; the operating system wasn’t being proactively maintained, certificates were getting out of date and sometimes the SIP trunks that enable calls to be carried over the public phone network would get blacklisted so that calls were dropped. It could take weeks of back and forth with the provider to find and sort the issues.
Problems came to a head on the crucial first day of clearing in 2024, when the on-premise session border controller lost connection to the SIP trunks in an outage that took six hours to resolve.
Better fit
Then a talk at Networkshop, the annual conference for our technical community, flagged our cloud-based session border controller managed service as a potential solution. It felt like a good idea, says Meenesh Patel, SOAS’s head of systems and networks, “because maintenance issues, sorting certificates and managing connectivity would be taken care of by Jisc as a managed service.
“We did speak to another provider too, and evaluated both, but we went with Jisc because they’re our education partner and they understand the sector.”
In half a dozen online workshops with SOAS we scoped out the best MS Teams configuration for their telephony needs and dived into the advanced features of MS Teams to help staff get the most out of its wider capabilities. Meenesh and Steve Pryor, who is the telephone and network engineer at SOAS, say they can use the platform to manage all sorts of day-to-day actions faster and better as a result.
Back when the original session border controller was implemented, transferring SOAS’s 1,201 phone numbers was fraught and took many weeks. In contrast, in 2025 we handled the transfer to our service on the agreed date in a process that Steve remembers as “incredibly smooth”. We completed the job hours ahead of expectations.
Scalable and responsive
Our session border controller service is scalable so users pay only for what they need. At busy times they can easily arrange extra SIP sessions and for clearing in 2025 SOAS did just that, scaling from its usual 50 lines to 100 ahead of clearing – but even that proved too few in the hectic first few hours after A-level results were released. Meenesh comments:
“On the first day of clearing Jisc monitored our lines and contacted us when they could see we were approaching the threshold.
“We didn’t know they’d do this and it allowed us to scale up to meet the demand. Extra capacity was available to us that morning. It was incredibly comforting at a stressful time: just above and beyond what we expected.”
Steve Pryor, telephone and network engineer, SOAS says:
“Jisc’s session border controller gives us a lot more resilience. When we had an on-premise solution there was so much that could – and did – go wrong. Now if there was a problem we probably wouldn’t even know, it’d just get fixed in the background and we’d get an email about it from Jisc later. I think it’s the best decision we ever made.”
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