The City of Hopkins’ telephone system was becoming outdated, costly to maintain (over $17,000 per year), and could not even handle 10 digit dialing. Mike Noe, MIS Director, worked with their consulting firm, Elert & Associates, to outline specifications for a new system and develop a Request for Proposal (RFP).

Through the RFP process, the City was able to narrow their options down to three vendors — one being Marco — and then visited the vendors’ facilities to review their capabilities and solutions. Mike explained, “Marco basically had the best solution for the lowest price of all the vendors. The Mitel system seemed to be the easiest system to support us.”

In January of 2004, Marco installed a Mitel 3300 Voice Over IP (VoIP) system at the City of Hopkins with traditional digital phones and some VoIP phones for remote location users. The system was installed at the City of Hopkins’ Fire Hall and City Hall. Although the City’s infrastructure is not 100% able to support VoIP, both systems are VoIP enabled for future growth and at the same time are compatible with their traditional handsets. Mike commented, “While costs were important, equally important was the organization. The solution Marco provided has been very reliable and gives us many new features such as remote VoIP phones at some of our locations.”

The City has a 1 GB fiber connection between the City Hall and Fire Hall; however, Mike wanted to utilize the City’s existing copper cabling for the connection to free up the fiber for their data network traffic. Marco’s data networking engineers assisted the City by installing Cisco switches at both the City Hall and Fire Hall to route the calls between the two locations. Mike commented, “It worked well for us. Since Marco also provides data networking services, they were able to assist us with our switches and firewall. The communication with Marco is good. I always feel like I can give them a call and they will have answers.”

Both systems in the Fire Hall and City Hall route calls so in the event of an emergency at one of the facilities, the other system can act as a backup system.

Marco also implemented Mitel’s Teleworker solution at the City’s Senior Activity Center with seven VoIP phones which run over the Internet. The City brought in a dedicated DSL line for the Internet phones to enhance their Internet connection. They also installed a UPS on every device associated with the Internet which helped secure the connection.

The City of Hopkins is pleased with the ease of maintenance of their new system. Mike explained, “I have Marco come over for some support, but the majority of the adds, moves, and changes we make I can do myself. Marco’s technicians seem pretty open about answering questions, and they can often talk me through issues over the phone or, if needed, get access to our system via the Internet to resolve the issue.

Mike went on, “I am happy with Marco’s service and the implementation went pretty smooth — our consultants agreed. I recently gave Marco and the Mitel system a positive review with another city looking at a similar system.”

“Because they have expertise in many areas of technology, Marco also has been able to provide us with other services such as Cisco data networking and software applications.”

Hopkins is a dynamic community of over 17,000 residents located just 13 minutes west of the Twin Cities. The City of Hopkins has approximately 100 full-time employees. Hopkins City Hall houses the Community Service, Planning and Economic Development, Engineering, Administration, Assessing, Inspections Departments, and the Police Department. The City has two separate networks to support residents within the four square
miles of Hopkins.