InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
|
May 14, 2001 |
 |
Menlo College: Starting At Ground Zero
By Candee Wilde
hen Patrick Olson, director of information technology at Menlo College in Atherton, Calif., began evaluating IP telephony alternatives, he was in the enviable position of starting at ground zero to create new voice and data communications systems. The finished product, which went live in time for the fall 2000 semester, is a Gigabit-Ethernet LAN that carries voice, data, and video.
"It was a big jump technologically from where we were before," Olson says. "We would argue it was a leap of several decades." He says voice over IP is a good choice for colleges because they have "to run a schizophrenic telephone system" that is part residential service for the dorms and part business service for faculty and staff offices.
"With voice over IP, we can do both, plus offer students a proper on-campus network and Internet access, which is an important competitive issue for the college," Olson says.
The converged network replaces Menlo College's first campus network--a shared, 10-Mbit Ethernet Cabletron LAN that linked four of the 13 buildings on campus with a fiber ring. It was more than 15 years old. For years, Pacific Bell Telephone Co. provided Centrex-based local phone service to the dormitories, and required each student to arrange their own account, and pay the set-up fee and monthly charges.
"If a line didn't work, the students had to pay to have it fixed. And it could be as much as $200 to get a student started with phone service," Olson says. Furthermore, students could not use modems that were faster than 28.8 Kbps to access the Internet, and they had no direct access to the campus LAN.
Early in 2000, Menlo College brought in outside contractors to help design, build, and configure a Gigabit Ethernet backbone to replace the old LAN. "We realized the best thing would be to combine [telephone and data] projects by finding a way to wire the dorms for data and run telephone service at the same time. That's how we became interested in voice over IP," Olson explains. Menlo College selected Cisco's Architecture for Voice, Video, and Integrated Data (Avvid) network because it wanted a scaleable IP telephony system that would have room for future systems and third-party applications. "We should be able to put whatever we want into the network," says Olson. "We don't want to rebuild anything unless it's structural."
With an IT staff of four and just a few months to complete the project, the college hired contractors to help design, build, and configure the converged network over the summer, in time for the fall semester. They started by rewiring all campus buildings, including the dorms, with Category 5 cable, and then laid fiber to connect all buildings on campus. Two T1 lines, supplied by different carriers to protect against failure, link the college's LAN to the Internet and public switched telephone network.
Menlo College is using Cisco Catalyst switches throughout the network; there's one switch in each building and one in the data center, for a total of 1,100 ports. Each switch is connected to a Cisco inline power-patch panel, which delivers electricity to the Cisco IP telephones. A new data center houses all of the servers: two Cisco 7835 servers each running Call Manager 3.0, a Cisco 550 cache engine, dual firewalls, a Domain Name System server, the college's external Web site, and a Cisco 2621 router for Internet access. About 500 people are using the IP phone system. (A 100-station deployment of Cisco's Avvid system, including all switches, IP phones, and two T1 trunks costs about $100,000.)
Each dorm has one switched 100-Mbps Ethernet port per student so they can connect an IP phone to the wall jack and a PC to the IP phone. Menlo College charges students for local calls, which is helping cover the cost of the system. But the fees are less than they would pay for comparable Centrex service, Olson says, and the students choose their own long-distance providers.
Students, faculty, and staff are using Cisco's IP Phone 7960, which has an LCD display for information like calling-party name and number dialed, interactive soft keys, and programmable line or feature buttons. In addition to working with Cisco's CallManager technology, the company's IP phones interoperate with H.323 and the Session Initialization Protocol. In the future, Cisco plans to incorporate Media Gateway Control Protocol.
Cisco expanded its voice-over-IP business in 1998 when it purchased Selsius Systems, an IP telephony equipment and software vendor. Since then, it has incorporated the Dallas-based startups' PBXs and phones into its product line. "Voice is one of the key initiatives inside Cisco, throughout all lines of business," says Hank Lambert, Cisco's director of product marketing, enterprise IP telephony.
Along with E-mail, Menlo Park is using its intranet to place work orders, arrange meetings, post course information, and submit expense reports. The college is working on a directory system and plans to consider additional IP telephony applications, as they become available. Currently, Olson is testing Cisco WebAttendant, an XML-based application that dispatches calls and monitors the status of every line, emulating the function of a manual attendant console in a traditional phone system.
"We'll continue beta testing different things. The phone itself has a tremendous number of facilities," Olson says, including a function enabling users to speed dial through a Web page. "We haven't deployed that yet because there are only four of us. We've been swallowing all of the details about how to do those things, and I think we'll have more of these features available to users in the next few weeks."
 E-mail To A Friend | Printer-Friendly |  Send Us Your Feedback |
|
|
