Telecommunications >> VoIP is for Victory

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Telecommunications >> VoIP is for Victory

5/27/2005

By Matt Villano

Tracy Schr'eder, CIO at USF, says that the decision to slowly transition to VoIP reflected a decision on the part of her staffers not to commit to an expensive campuswide technology overhaul without a period of trial-and-error.

“If we had just run with VoIP and not done the due diligence of what it would have cost, we could have moved more quickly but faced a failed implementation,” she explains. Now, she adds, “We’ll have a stable solution that meets our needs and gives us the ability to do the cool stuff when it’s time and when it’s appropriate.” According to Schr'eder, for the time being, USF will run its voice communications over traditional Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) technology that historically has enabled telephone

companies to migrate from analog to digital on all-long-distance trunks. Later this year, however, when two new buildings on campus are completed, USF will experiment with VoIP there, and support both systems on the same infrastructure. In the meantime, campus technologists gradually will test enhanced features on both digital and IP-based networks, including unified messaging, call forwarding, e-mail-based voicemail, and more. In the end, USF d'esn’t expect to save much money on its new network, Schr'eder says, but it will achieve greater redundancy and a modern, feature-rich telephone system: “This will be a much higher-capacity network with more reliability and more stability,” she concludes.

“These things make you feel like you’re part of Star Trek, but the funny thing is that they really are great,” he said during that call, and I could even hear birds chirping in the background as he spoke. “The technology itself is so wonderful that when you’re using the devices, they feel just like a headset or cordless phone, and you forget that they’re working on VoIP.”

As Levine indicates, the Vocera devices are part of a larger wired and wireless VoIP implementation. Also last year, in a program designed solely for freshman at first, the school rolled out free softphones—software that allows users to make and receive phone calls on PCs or PDAs. Under this program, calls will be routed over the school’s converged voice/data and video network, and will be free to students whether the calls are long-distance or local. For the initial rollout in the fall of 2004, Dartmouth distributed Windows-based IP SoftPhone solutions from Cisco (www.cisco.com), and plans to distribute clients for the school’s Pocket PC, Palm, and Mac users.

Though Dartmouth meted out its softphone clients in rounds of 200 to the freshmen, Levine says the school plans to extend the service to all other students, faculty, and staff members by the end of the year. He adds that both the softphone and the Vocera programs were closely tied to the school’s 2004 decision not to charge for long-distance phone calls, which coincided with the extension of a wire-based VoIP network into the wireless environment. Thanks to carefully placed 802.11b access points, all of these wireless technologies work everywhere on campus—even in places where cellular service is compromised. The coverage may not be galactic, but by today’s standards, it’s truly impressive.