Terrorist attack kicked VoIP pilot program into high gear

At the Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York, a voice-over-IP migration pilot underwent baptism by fire when the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 prompted a more aggressive approach to convergence.

Serving 17,000 students just blocks from Ground Zero, BMCC is part of the City University of New York (CCNY) and the largest single college in New York City. Classes were under way when World Trade Center towers collapsed, taking Verizon's access network offline indefinitely and damaging one of the college's two main buildings. Fiterman Hall at 30 West Broadway is still out of commission, and BMCC is using temporary classrooms at an uptown CCNY facility.

BMCC started looking at VoIP in 2000 when a pending migration from an ATM-based network to an all-Ethernet environment provided an upgrade opportunity. The plan was to implement VoIP in the data center and then roll it out to the entire school.

The 155M bit/sec ATM core was being replaced with Gigabit Ethernet running across redundant multimode fiber connections. And while the 1,500 workstations in the academic departments were already on 10M or 10/100M bit/sec Ethernet, the 700 desktops throughout the administrative departments -- including IT -- were equipped with 25M bit/sec ATM.

"We had to touch each desktop machine, because the ATM [network interface cards] had to be removed," says Joseph Giummo, associate director of IT for BMCC. The Ethernet equipment was staged last summer, and computer center was migrated just before fall classes began.

Giummo and his staff expected to complete the Ethernet conversion by Thanksgiving. Once the infrastructure was in place, the VoIP pilot could begin.

Then came Sept. 11. BMCC lost one building, and Verizon's Centrex service to the nearby main campus vanished.

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How the BMCC's voice-over-IP implementation works

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Thanks to the location-independent nature of the Internet, BMCC's e-mail and distance-learning servers were moved and back online within days. No one knew when Verizon's access network would be back up.

"An institution of higher education cannot disappear off the phone network and Internet for any length of time and stay in business," Giummo says. The pending VoIP pilot suddenly took on a whole new meaning.

The upgrade to Gigabit Ethernet was kicked into overdrive, and the entire school was moved from ATM by the time the main campus reopened Oct. 1. This provided the necessary infrastructure for the Alcatel PCX 4400, an open, Unix-based PBX platform that can support IP, digital and analog handsets.

The equipment was rushed from Paris to within four blocks of Ground Zero through some major security checkpoints. And the 70 IP phones for the pilot suddenly swelled to 725, making BMCC one of the largest IP-telephony installations in the New York area.

The expensive IP phones were deployed in a top-down fashion, starting with the college president and department heads. However, the administrative staff handling student information services was put near the top of the list as well, because it was important that students could call in and find out when the school was reopening.

The Alcatel switch also supports a number of analog and digital phones, and 35 fax lines. A small, wall-mounted cabinet -- the OmniPCX 4400 WM1 -- concentrates the connections in the temporary mobile classrooms at CCNY back to the PCX 4400 at the main campus.

The converged network requires constant tweaking, but the PCX management server helps. Initially, BMCC was taking advantage of four basic reports: usage, trunk summary, cost center and transport primary rate interfaces.

BMCC has plotted out a four-year return on investment. Part of the return will come from eliminating $25,000-per-month Centrex charges, though the cost of in-house management will offset some of these savings.

According to Alcatel, the price per seat for VoIP ranges from $600 to $1,000, depending on volume and features.

"But when you look at the convenience of putting voice, data and video over the same pipe, and consider the new applications this convergence enables, it will save money in the long run," Giummo says.

The first new application BMCC plans to implement involves interactive voice response technology to enhance the Web-based student registration process.

The college also is developing a call center application that will give the Student Information Services staff members instant access to more information and let them respond more quickly and thoroughly to student requests.

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