Case Study: City of Schoten achieves nearly $50,000 in annual savings and improved scalability with Digium's Asterisk

City Of Schoten - Customer Case Study

The City of Schoten, a Belgian municipality of 33,000, faced rising telephony costs and complexity from 15 disparate phone systems serving 400 staff across 15 locations. With an ICT team of three, annual telephone expenses exceeded $120,000 (about 30% for internal calls) and maintenance costs were high, making scalability, moves, and new services difficult and expensive.

Schoten migrated to Digium’s open-source Asterisk IP‑PBX, deploying two servers and VoIP soft phones to eliminate internal call charges and simplify management. The move cut internal call costs by $24,000 and is projected to save nearly $50,000 annually, while delivering faster call processing, easy IVR/CRM integration, quick deployments (soft phones operational in 15 minutes), improved scalability, redundancy, and lower maintenance overhead.