Fixing Poor Connectivity: A Gamma Horizon Case Study for Avon Forest Autos

Introduction

For a busy vehicle and equipment sales business like Avon Forest Autos, missing a customer call can easily mean losing a high-value sale. Operating across the South of England, the company relies heavily on consistent communication to negotiate and complete purchases for everything from vans to plant machinery. However, an outdated on-premise PBX paired with fragile ISDN2e lines and inadequate broadband speeds was causing frequent disruptions. Forcing staff to rely on unprofessional mobile diversions, the setup was no longer fit for purpose. Here is how we tackled the root cause of their connectivity issues, delivering a robust, future-proof communications platform ahead of the UK's PSTN switch-off.

The Challenge

Avon Forest Autos is a Bournemouth-based vehicle and equipment sales business operating across the South of England, offering a broad range of products — from cars, vans and trucks through to cherry pickers, mini diggers, plant machinery and generators. With customers relying on them to enquire, negotiate and complete purchases, consistent and reliable communication is fundamental to the business.

The business was running on an outdated on-premise PBX connected via legacy ISDN2e lines, and it was letting them down in two interconnected ways:

• Poor broadband speeds — the existing internet connectivity was inadequate, limiting what the business could do and creating a fragile foundation for any cloud-based services.
• Frequent BT line issues — unreliable PSTN line performance meant calls were regularly disrupted, and the business had developed a workaround habit of diverting calls to mobile phones whenever the lines failed — an inefficient and unprofessional stopgap.

The combination of an end-of-life PBX, ageing ISDN2e infrastructure, and unreliable underlying connectivity created a resilience problem the business could not continue to accept.

The Solution

We addressed both the connectivity and communications challenges together, delivering a two-part solution that tackled the root cause — not just the symptoms.

The deployment comprised:

• Leased line installation — a dedicated leased line was installed to replace the unreliable BT PSTN connection, providing Avon Forest Autos with fast, stable, and resilient broadband as the foundation for their new cloud platform.
• Migration to Gamma Horizon — the outdated on-premise PBX and ISDN2e lines were decommissioned and replaced with Gamma Horizon, a fully hosted cloud VoIP solution. This removed the dependency on ageing hardware and the PSTN network entirely.
• Full number porting — all existing telephone numbers were successfully ported across to the new platform, ensuring continuity for every customer and supplier contact.

By installing the leased line first, we ensured the Horizon platform had the robust connectivity it needed to perform reliably — eliminating the core issue of poor speeds and line instability that had plagued the previous setup.

Notable Outcome

Why It Mattered

In a sales business, availability is everything. When a customer calls to enquire about a van, a cherry picker, or a generator, an unanswered or dropped call can mean a lost sale that goes straight to a competitor. For Avon Forest Autos, the fragility of their old system was a direct business risk.

By combining a leased line with Gamma Horizon, we delivered a solution that addressed that risk at its root. The connectivity is now fast and dedicated. The phone system is cloud-hosted and resilient. And all existing numbers were carried across — so from a customer's perspective, nothing changed except that calls now connect reliably, every time.

With ISDN2e lines being withdrawn as part of the UK's ongoing PSTN switch-off, the migration also future-proofed the business — ensuring Avon Forest Autos is well ahead of the industry-wide transition rather than scrambling to catch up.