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Telecommunications: Can Cisco Answer the Call?
9/29/2004
In fact, part of Nortel’s appeal is the company’s extensive PBX experience married to its growing VoIP expertise. Consider the background of Frank Shepherd, Nortel’s director of IP Telephony and Engaged Business Applications. The 22-year company veteran amassed PBX expertise for nearly two decades and spotted the VoIP opportunity in 1997. “My team mastered the dial-tone world and began assessing VoIP more than six years ago,” says Shepherd. “Now, we’ve got a full product line and a network of partners ready to assist with deployments.”
And carriers such as SBC Communications (www.sbc.com),
for instance, are getting into the act: SBC now offers multimedia communication
solutions based on VoIP equipment from Nortel. Faced with falling demand for
traditional phone services, SBC and other telecom companies—AT&T,
MCI (www.mci.com), Qwest Communications
(www.qwest.com), Verizon
(www22.verizon.com),
and others—have aggressively pushed into the VoIP market this year. Those
telecom giants also face heated competition from startups such as Net2Phone
(www.net2phone.com) and
Vonage (www.vonage.com),
which typically target small businesses and residential customers with low-cost
VoIP services. Vonage, a privately held startup, is among the residential VoIP
leaders, with 250,000 customers. It’s unclear how much of a push the company
intends to make into the university marketplace.
| Know Your Options |
| A sampling of major VoIP product suppliers: Avaya Inc., www.avaya.com 3Com Corp., www.3com.com Cisco Systems Inc., www.cisco.com Lucent Technologies Inc., www.lucent.com Nortel Networks Inc., www.nortelnetworks.com |
How to Plug In
Regardless of which supplier a university chooses, VoIP rollouts require plenty of prep work and network reconfiguration. Brandeis, for instance, installed UPS (uninterruptible power supplies) from emergency power supplies designer American Power Conversion (APC) Corp. (www.apc.com) in more than 100 wiring closets, prior to rolling out VoIP. The reason: Unlike traditional phones, VoIP phones need emergency power during brownouts and blackouts. The university also embraced power-over-Ethernet, a standard that sends low-voltage electricity from wiring closets to desktops, over network connections. This negates the need to plug every VoIP phone into a wall outlet.
Although Brandeis’ deployment proceeded without a hitch, CIO Hanson warns about possible trouble spots. In particular: It’s difficult to find skilled VoIP consultants and integrators who have multiple projects under their belts. Brandeis overcame that obstacle via a campus/vendor partnership with Verizon Communications’ consulting arm, a longtime Cisco partner with telecom and VoIP experience.
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