Teams Insider

Teams Phone Theme Parks and Attractions Globally

Paul Cornish, UC Architect at Merlin Entertainments, walks through a decade-long voice journey across roughly 140 theme parks, hotels and attractions worldwide — from OCS and Lync with on-premises Ribbon gateways to Teams Phone with cloud PSTN. He covers analogue and DECT edge cases, 2,500 phones on

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Who should listen: M365 service owners and UC architects running voice across many geographically dispersed, non-desk-based sites — retail, hospitality, leisure, manufacturing — particularly anyone planning Skype for Business or PBX exit, Teams SIP Gateway reuse, DECT and analogue edge cases, or licence-reclaim reporting.

Guest: Paul Cornish — UC Architect, Merlin Entertainments

Many thanks to Pure IP, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

Merlin's estate is about 140 attractions, spanning parks a mile and a half wide, attractions inside shopping malls, hotels, analogue lines and DECT — so there is no single telephony pattern to roll out globally. ▶ 2:30
The programme started small and deliberately: a single new London IT site, a short RFP for a SIP provider (Pure IP) terminating into Merlin's own data centres, live in a few weeks. Only once that was proven did they attack a complex park — 200 analogue lines and CAS circuits fronted by a Ribbon (then Sonus) gateway, deployed as phones only with no desktop client for users. ▶ 3:32
Around 90 sites went to Skype for Business Enterprise Voice, then direct routing as a service removed most of the on-premises complexity: with Pure IP nodes in Europe, Asia and America, moving a number from a data centre SIP trunk to direct routing became a portal change rather than a project. ▶ 6:05
Migrating physical phones was the hardest part. Microsoft's guidance is to factory reset each device, which means visiting all 250 phones on a park. The team worked out how to reset while retaining the PIN and used a public script to generate sign-in codes — allowing a whole site to be cut from Skype for Business to Teams in a single evening. ▶ 7:07
2,500 Poly VVX handsets still run on Teams SIP Gateway rather than being replaced ("they never break"), Spectralink DECT moved across to SIP Gateway seamlessly with just licences, and stray analogue devices go via AudioCodes MP series; most lift phones have moved to 4G. DECT coverage design still matters — base stations have to keep a call up while walking through a Sea Life shark tunnel. ▶ 11:13
The commercial case: a theme park with ISDN lines and a supported PBX could cost £3,000–£4,000 a month, versus roughly £100–£150 a month for a global SIP provider with DDIs — plus the disappearance of move/add/change tickets for desk moves. Multiplied across 130 attractions, that is the headline saving. ▶ 13:16
Meeting rooms are standardised on Teams Rooms on Windows with a Logitech Tap and an HDMI cable in every room, including the smallest, so the join experience is identical everywhere; a handful of Android devices and Neat Boards exist for whiteboarding. Cornish pushes back on £70 room cameras by selling supportability, not cost. ▶ 14:49
A self-built Power BI report (SharePoint lists, Graph and PowerShell) runs every Monday to show leavers still holding voice licences, users without a voice policy, and common area phones not signed in this year — enough to find 150 unused licences to redeploy to a new site instead of buying more. ▶ 19:23
Call quality complaints have effectively vanished: nobody has reported a bad call in the past year, versus "loads" in the Skype for Business days, so bespoke quality reporting matters less than it did and the data in the Teams admin centre is good enough. ▶ 22:57
Where a site has no upstream complexity, skip the interim gateway phase — number porting is reliable enough now to take a site down for a few hours, port straight to direct routing and sign in 150 phones with three or four people in a day. ▶ 23:58