Many colleges see drawbacks to VoIP

BALTIMORE - Even the lure of phone systems that withstand disasters combined with the benefits of unified messaging don’t outweigh the costs to bring IP communications to college campuses, according to a survey by ACUTA, the Association for Communications Professionals in Higher Education.

While as many as 48% of respondents say they find a range of very attractive features with VoIP, 42% see no compelling benefits to retiring traditional phone systems in favor of IP [see graphic], according to the survey of 279 ACUTA members released last week at the group’s Summit on IP Communications in Higher Education.

Some schools veer away from the technology because their old systems still work. “I have an installed legacy base, and I don’t hear anyone screaming to me that they have a killer app that only VoIP can supply,” says Tammy Closs, assistant vice president of communications and systems infrastructure at Duke University.

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Other schools find the cost of installing VoIP to be daunting. For example, the University of California at Irvine calculated it would cost $8.5 million to replace its current 1985 Ericsson PBX and Digital Sound voice mail system. $3.3 million of that would be for power over Ethernet upgrades and uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) to keep phones up when electric service fails, says Brian Buckler, director of network and telecom operations at the school. IP phones alone would cost $3.1 million, he says.

Still, the school is moving ahead with VoIP, deploying it in new buildings where the costs of network infrastructure and UPSs are covered by the construction costs. The network upgrades needed to support VoIP reliably have been made because of increased demand for a reliable data network, Buckler says, and he urges other schools to do the same.

“Making data networks rock-solid is a feather in your cap,” he says. “Then paying $50,000 for call control for a VoIP implementation is chump change. You can buy old phones from the green market.”

Bring on resiliency

Because VoIP systems are distributed, they are more resilient when equipment and links do fail, says Scott Kincaid, CIO of Butler University in Indianapolis, where an end-of-life PBX led to a new VoIP system that adds important new features the old system lacked.