Chicago Public Schools deploys citywide VoIP to cut costs, improve communication

The Chicago Public Schools, the nation's third-largest school system, is starting a five-year VoIP rollout this month to improve communications among teachers and parents, while slashing millions of dollars in recurring telecom and maintenance expenses out of the school's budget, city IT officials say.

The Chicago school system recently signed a $28 million deal with Mitel to install IP PBX hardware, voicemail and a mix of IP and digital telephone handsets across 700-plus schools and other facilities, with around 19,000 phones to be installed. The school system says it will save around $6 million per year, when the installation is complete, by eliminating its annual Centrex bills — which can run $20 to $25 per phone.

The current voice network a the Chicago Public Schools consists of disparate, standalone PBX phones systems from Avaya, and over 19,000 Centrex lines rented from AT&T on a monthly basis, according to Katie Zalewski, telecom director schools.

VoIP became a consideration as a replacement technology two years ago, when the school district upgraded its IP network equipment, installing Cisco switches and routers in the schools, and linking buildings with a mix of T-1 lines and Gigabit Ethernet fiber links.

"Our data network is very well established and very reliable," Zalewski says. "Instead of reinventing the wheel, we decided to utilize that data net to pull voice traffic over it."

Each site will get a Mitel IP Communications Platform (ICP) 3300 VoIP switch, capable of supporting up to several hundred phones per site. Two IP phones will be deployed in each principal's office, with the rest of the phones being digital handsets.

"A lot of our schools are over 100 years old so we don't have the [cabling] infrastructure at this point to go 100% IP," Zalewski says. "It is very costly to upgrade an infrastructure for all IP handsets."

All handsets installed in the school system's administrative offices will be IP, totally around 3,000 sets in the department's downtown Chicago offices. Between these offices and the schools, the IT department will manage around 5,000 IP phones total, Zalewski says

The 700 Mitel IPC 3300 phone switches deployed will share a common dial plan and directory, provided by a centralized Mitel Enterprise Manager server, which synchronizes data across the phone switches.

The Enterprise Manager will also allow the school's IT staff to provide remote administration and support services to the schools, Zalewski says.

In the past, she says, "if anyone needed to move or reprogram a phone, or have a password change we had to send out a body." Such IPC 3300 administrative and handset reprogramming tasks can be taken care of through the management software , Zalewski adds.

Key to the VoIP rollout is the recently-upgraded LAN and WAN infrastructure throughout the school district. Most middle and elementary schools in Chicago have a single Catalyst 6503 or 6606 switch chassis in the basement or communications closet. Instead of using separate routers and LAN switches in each school, all network gear is consolidated into a 6500 chassis for each site, which made for an easy deployment, and simplified management, says Steve Dorner, deputy CIO for the Chicago Public Schools, who oversaw the data upgrade.