INTERQUARTZ, the manufacturing arm of Pennine Telecom of Bury, has just completed a major order to help students at a top British university keep in touch and online.

The Salford Street company has supplied 2,000 telephones as part of a massive project for the University of Glasgow to provide the students in halls of residence with a telephone and an Internet point in each of their rooms.

The university wanted to improve the services offered to its students and brought in Masterpoint, an engineering-based communications solution provider specialising in large projects and specialist communications applications. This was on a ten-year contract to provide fully managed voice and data services.

The telephones needed to be low-cost yet extremely reliable, have a modem socket built-in, be wall-mountable and printed with the university's logo for security purposes. Masterpoint discussed the issue with its Interquartz supplier, Westcon. The global networking and telecommunications distributor suggested the Interquartz IQ10. The university was happy to accept this recommendation, having used Interquartz telephones in its offices for many years.

Roy Stephenson, Interquartz account manager, said: "We are very grateful to both Westcon and Masterpoint for winning this deal.

"The IQ10 is a great telephone and has proved to be a real success in its first year. Because we have our own factory, we were able to screen print the telephones for Glasgow University during manufacture, which means we could deliver the highest quality at the lowest price."

Mick Everett, the sales director at Masterpoint, commented: "The complete project included many elements - structured cabling, telephone systems, Voice Mail, Ethernet hardware, servers, Phonecard platform and Network Services.."

He added: "It was extremely useful that Interquartz met the tight delivery timescales."