VoIP makes the grade

While K-12 public schools typically aren't known for their cutting-edge networks, many education IT professionals are learning quickly the ABCs of voice over IP through early deployments.

Public school districts around the country are implementing voice/data convergence as a way to reduce telecom costs while offering telephony features to staff and administrators that go far beyond what was available in the past on traditional phone systems.

Many school districts now run Gigabit Ethernet metropolitan-area networks after securing long-reach fiber-optic cabling through deals with local telecom and cable TV providers, or by pooling resources with other organizations. This boost in bandwidth has spurred IP telephony deployment in school districts such as the Ridley School District in Folsom, Pa.

Ridley recently installed Alcatel's OmniPCX 4400 - a hybrid IP and traditional TDM PBX - and 150 IP phones throughout seven elementary schools, a middle school and a high school. "We were looking to reduce our overall telecom costs, and one way to do that was to centralize multiple switches and consolidate the number of lines we needed," says Nicholas Ignatuk, Ridley School District superintendent.

As part of cable company Comcast's franchise agreement with the town of Folsom, it installed fiber-optic cable to link all the district's sites. All the IP phones connect to the OmniPCX 4400 over a Gigabit Ethernet backbone, eliminating the $4,000 monthly expense for T-1 lines to join PBXs in each school. The Alcatel box and phones cost about $94,600.

With phones in most classrooms and common areas, such as lunchrooms and auditoriums, teachers can contact each other more easily than when they relied on student couriers to deliver handwritten notes. More phones also make it easier to call 911 or school administrators in an emergency.

What's more, the OmniPCX gives voice mail to all teachers and administrators for the first time. Next year, the district will integrate its e-mail servers with voice mail to provide a unified messaging system. Ignatuk says the biggest challenge of this rollout will be end-user training, because the school year affords little time for teachers to learn new technologies.

In the western Texas Tornillo School District near El Paso, Altigen's hybrid TDM/VoIP system let the district deploy $30 commodity analog phones in classrooms and offices while using IP to run voice traffic between two high schools.

Instead of upgrading the schools' Nortel key systems, Chuck Palmer, network specialist for the district, chose an Altigen AltiServ box for each site. Unlike the key systems, the AltiServs can be linked directly over a T-1 data line and may share a similar four-digit dial plan.

Palmer says VoIP eliminated the need for several outside phone lines at both sites, saving about $3,400 per month. And because federal E-rate funding pays for 90% of the school's T-1 costs, all internal calls between the buildings are basically free.

With voice now running over the T-1 line connecting the schools, there is still enough bandwidth for Internet traffic and sharing network resources, such as a CD-ROM library. Teachers in the south high school can access school records housed on servers in the north building across town without application slowdown, Palmer adds.

Another big cost savings came by breaking away from the proprietary Nortel key system and phones. "The most expensive part of any voice system are the phones themselves," Palmer says. With the Nortel phones costing about $120, he says, "we saved almost $50,000 on [total equipment expense] because we were able to use inexpensive phones." The total cost of the project was about $76,000.

Recurring costs of maintenance for its PBXs and monthly Centrex phone charges are some of the things the Appleton School District in Wisconsin is looking to avoid when it goes live with a six-site VoIP network based on Mitel's 3340 IP PBX.

The district, which still has several PBXs from various vendors and Centrex lines from Ameritech, now has a high school and an administrative building using the Mitel system. Once the Mitel boxes are installed at six central sites, extending IP telephony connections to the district's 24 buildings will be simple, says Jim Hawbaker, the district's technology director. All buildings are linked via Gigabit Ethernet running on single-mode fiber. The district and several other municipal organizations pooled their money together to have private fiber installed for each of the groups, which includes the public works department, libraries and police.

"The fiber is the real enabling factor that's letting us use [VoIP] on such a large scale," Hawbaker says.

Hawbaker says that while the high-speed fiber network will ease the school district's IP telephony deployment, the biggest challenge will come in designing a cohesive four-digit dial plan for the various departments in the school district.

Although the complete Mitel system cost $1.2 million for the six Mitel boxes and more than 200 IP phones, Hawbaker says eliminating PBX maintenance contracts and consolidating from 900 outside phone lines throughout the district to 140 centralized lines will save about $600,000 per year. He expects to have the system paid for in three years.

While IP telephony and VoIP have helped some schools cut telecom costs by converging separate networks, the Pendergast School District in Phoenix is taking IP telephony to the next level, in its classrooms. The district recently replaced multiple key telephone systems with three Cisco CallManager IP PBXs in its data center, and deployed Cisco 7940 and 7910 IP telephones in classrooms and administrative offices -- around 2,000 phones. Everything is tied together with a routed Cisco-based WAN, which runs voice and data.

With the XML and Java capabilities on the Cisco IP phones, Pendergast worked with XML application vendor Calence to develop applications that could tap the converged network,says John Moreno, MIS director for the school district.

Teachers at the Pendergast schools now use the IP phones to enter data such as class attendance and to check on student records. Teachers can view text on the LCD screens on the phones and enter information through the keypad or with programmed special feature buttons.

The phone-based applications access an XML-enabled Web server, which interfaces to an IBM AS/400, where all student records are kept.

The phone-based applications let the school process student attendance totals in minutes instead of half days, Moreno says, which allows the school to contact parents more quickly when it can't account for students.

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