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Telecommunications: Can Cisco Answer the Call?
9/29/2004
Answering the Call
To date, most universities have only given VoIP a look during some sort of critical turning point—such as the dedication of a new building or when a legacy PBX nears the end of its practical use.“As a technology, VoIP is ready now,” says Dartmouth’s Levine. “But you should move when the time is right for your own institution. If you are looking at replacing an expensive PBX and your IP network is in good shape, now might be the time to begin planning for it.”
In Dartmouth’s case, the school purchased its previous phone system from AT&T (www.att.com) in 1988 and upgraded it to Ericsson (www.ericsson.com) in 1994. Fast forward 10 years, and the college was eager for a modern phone system that offered staff, faculty, and students on-screen directories, message-waiting indicators, and the ability to use wireless notebooks as phones. “For all of these reasons, VoIP made a lot of sense for us,” says Levine.
| Getting Ready for VoIP |
| Before embarking on any VoIP deployment, take the following four steps: 1. Determine the existing traffic levels on your data and voice networks. This will help to determine your QoS (quality of service) requirements and bandwidth needs for an IP telephony (VoIP) network. 2. Detect and resolve existing network issues such as bottlenecks in certain LAN segments. 3. Develop an accurate picture of your current network topology to uncover potential routing and switching issues. 4. Establish a baseline of current network performance in order to measure future performance and determine whether you’re meeting your goals. Source: NEC Unified Solutions Inc. |
And Hanson at Brandeis warns against the technology-for-technology’s sake factor: “Don’t put in VoIP because it’s cool. You should consider VoIP when your old PBX nears retirement.” Indeed, Brandeis had an 18-year-old telecommunications switch before migrating to Cisco’s VoIP phones in mid-2003. The previous system “was a hodgepodge solution that the university had cobbled together and the original vendor would no longer support,” recalls Hanson. “We suffered two crashes and that usually d'esn’t happen with PBXs, so we knew it was time to make a move.”
Plenty of Alternatives
All of this is not to suggest that other telecom vendors are not offering quality VoIP solutions of their own. Market researcher Synergy confirms that Cisco leads the VoIP market, but plenty of universities are deploying VoIP systems from Nortel, Avaya Inc. (www.avaya.com), 3Com, and other suppliers. Just ask IT administrators at Australia’s Ballarat University (Victoria), which remains firmly committed to Nortel as it transitions from PBXs to VoIP.“We already had five Nortel Meridian PBXs,” says Jeff Dowsley, manager of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) Strategy and Planning at Ballarat. “We chose Nortel because they had an evolutionary path from traditional PBXs to IP-based services using their Internet Trunk Gateway. This gave us an easy path to VoIP without the need to establish Call Managers and the like, which would have blown the budget.”
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