Best Buy is a leading electrical and electronic goods chain in Israel, attracting hundreds of thousands of consumers annually. The chain has 17 stores spread across the country and recently inaugurated ‘Best Buy City’, the largest collection of such products offered under one roof. Products are also sold through the company’s satellite ‘Net Buy’ network—electronic sales terminals staffed by sales advisors who are located in many branches of Home Center (a sister company).

Best Buy is owned by the Fishman Group, one of Israel largest private investment concerns with over $2.5 billion in annual income from its combined companies.

The Move to Advanced Communications

For internal communications between stores, Best Buy had relied on legacy Israeli switching networks: Sifranet (digital leased lines) and Frame Relay. In November 2003, management decided to shift to an IP-based network via ADSL lines.

Following a thorough examination and assessment of various systems and vendors, Best Buy selected the VoIP equipment of BOS. “Our great advantage was our ability to connect existing communication channels to BOS’s gateways, and immediately enable high quality, real-time, two-way voice conversations over the public Internet,” explained Shalom Amsalem, BOS Director Technical Sales.

BOS suggested a comprehensive VoIP solution based on compact ROBO systems for the distributed branch stores, and a larger Claro gateway for Best Buy headquarters.

ROBO is a small footprint, 2-port voice gateway with built-in NAT router, stateful firewall, and embedded 4-port switch. Designed for small remote/branch/home offices, the ROBO is equipped with two FXS and two FXO interfaces.

As part of the Claro family of BOS gateways, the ROBO is fully user-transparent and guarantees MOS-based quality of service. Providing point-to-point call routing over IP networks, the ROBO minimizes call costs without sacrificing call quality or data safety. The gateways switch all the relevant corporate traffic to the data network when QoS meets a user-defined threshold. Below this threshold, traffic reverts dynamically to the PSTN. In this way, Best Buy could guarantee the quality of every voice conversation and reduce intra-store call costs to nearly zero.

In January 2004, Best Buy launched a one-month pilot that included its headquarters and two stores. Following its success, Best Buy rolled out the solution to all locations.

The project was managed by Yosefi Ditel, Chief Information Officer of the Fishman Group and Udi Cohen, Managing Director of VirgoNet communications infrastructure integration company and network consultant for the Fishman Group.

“BOS’s solution enables us to save maintenance and support costs while ensuring an unprecedented level of call quality” says Yosefi Ditel, Chief Information Officer of the Fishman Group.