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5/27/2005
www.siemens.com) answered the call immediately.Siemens was no stranger to FAU. Previously, the firm had installed the PBX boxes at all of the school’s locations. It wasn’t surprising, then, that instead of proposing to scuttle the entire PBX strategy, Siemens pitched a solution that revolved around IP-enabling the systems already in place. Specifically, the plan called for upgrading one of the switches at the school’s Boca Raton campus and launching Internet Protocol Distributed Architecture (IPDA) shells on each of the other campuses. Under this strategy, FAU could bundle voice and data packets together whenever necessary. The best part, of course, is that because the IPDA initiated in Boca Raton, school technology officials on that campus could control the entire network centrally.
“To discard the existing system and buy everything new would have been insane,” says Elise Angiolillo, director of Communications Services Infrastructure at FAU. “The solution they proposed simply made the most sense.”
Work on the $1 million conversion began toward the end of 2004; the last campus was switched to the VoIP system in April. Ostensibly (at least from the user perspective), nothing has changed; even though they can run VoIP telephones straight out of their Ethernet ports, most users still plug ordinary phones into analog phone jacks. Behind the scenes, however, everything is different—from the way voice traffic is transmitted, to the fact that long distance bills are a thing of the past. On the ledger sheet, the school covers its costs with a technology fee that it charges students every semester. And in the general fund, coffers are growing once again, now that all campus-to-campus calls are transmitted alongside standard Internet traffic.
Looking ahead, Angiolillo says she’s “cautiously optimistic” about other long-term benefits. Now that the conversion is complete, FAU is investing heavily in training courses to make sure that all of its IT staffers understand how to manage calls during periods of peak activity, and how to add or drop users as they enter or leave the environment. The school also recently launched a modest VoIP awareness campaign for users—particularly faculty and staff members—to combat fears about service disruption and to explain how to reach police in the event of emergencies. According to Angiolillo, FAU has added redundancies and e911 capabilities to ensure that both of these issues are under control. “Once users realize that VoIP is good,” she says, “the real fun begins.”