Early adopter shares VoIP lessons learned

A year into its migration to voice over IP, the U.S. Department of Education is enjoying better-than-expected performance and positive feedback from users. However, this pioneering federal agency is also running into some unforeseen glitches in the convergence of its voice and data messaging systems.

Overall, the agency's IT officials are pleased with their decision to move to a converged network architecture based on IP.

"The converged network architecture gives us flexibility, better response times for users, control over our telephony systems, back-end and toll-bypass savings," says Rick Miller, Deputy CIO at the Department of Education. In another three years, "we hope to have close to 100% of our employees on VoIP."

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A year into its migration to voice over IP, the U.S. Department of Education is enjoying better-than-expected performance and positive feedback from users. However, this pioneering federal agency is also running into some unforeseen glitches in the convergence of its voice and data messaging systems.

Overall, the agency's IT officials are pleased with their decision to move to a converged network architecture based on IP.

"The converged network architecture gives us flexibility, better response times for users, control over our telephony systems, back-end and toll-bypass savings," says Rick Miller, Deputy CIO at the Department of Education. In another three years, "we hope to have close to 100% of our employees on VoIP."

Like most large organizations, the Department of Education spends the lion's share of its telecommunications budget on voice services. Voice represents about 70% of its telecom budget, including 800-services, internal dialing and long-distance. The remaining 30% of its telecom budget covers data services, virtually all of which is IP traffic.

By running voice traffic over an IP backbone, the Department of Education is saving money on internal long distance calls as well as on network administration for adding new employees, deleting old employees or moving employees from one location to another.

The department's student loan unit is "getting tremendous savings because all the calls to our regions are local calls now and before they were all long-distance calls," Miller says. "It's also tremendously more efficient for us to have the network administration group that takes care of the PCs handle all network accounts. ... People don't realize how much time is tied up in the back-end in doing the moves, adds and changes."

A year ago, when 1,000 of the agency's employees moved to a new building here, agency IT officials decided to install a single, converged voice and data network rather than a traditional telephony infrastructure and a separate data network.

"One of our business units had the opportunity to move into a brand new building and consolidate scattered resources," Miller explains. "We had the opportunity to build their network infrastructure from scratch without having to replace anything."

Miller says the agency asked contractor IBM to analyze the difference in cost between installing a traditional PBX telephony system and VoIP. What the agency found is that the $2 million in hardware, software and installation for the VoIP system was essentially the same amount it would cost to install a regular telephony system.

The finding matched the agency's overall strategy of moving to a converged, IP network. Already, the agency had moved 99% of its data traffic to IP. Migrating voice traffic to IP was an obvious next step, agency officials say.

"We had a firm belief that data and voice convergence was a thing of the future and that we needed to go there," Miller says. "We thought: Why install a traditional telephony infrastructure when we didn't need to?"