Policies and network upgrades needed to support the technology, say state CIOs.
BURLINGTON, Vt. – Demand for VoIP in state government is high, but states are slow to adopt it because they first need to install infrastructure that supports the technology.
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Corporations that acquire other businesses face the task of unifying networks. Statewide IT officials are placed in a similar situation and have to deal with integrating separate department networks that were created with no overarching architecture or standards in place, according to many state IT officials at last week’s Northeast regional meeting of the National Association of State Telecommunications Directors (NASTD ).
Vermont is one of the few states without this problem because it currently uses carrier-based Centrex service for all departments. It is upgrading its data WAN to support IP voice, said Christopher Campbell, deputy commissioner of the Department of Information and Innovation.
“We’re improving the WAN to do VoIP with quality of service,” Campbell said. “We’re keeping a very, very open mind.” The state hopes bids for statewide phone services – when the current contract expires in two years – will attract proposals for VoIP, but the technology won’t be prescribed in the RFP, he said.
Other states say they still are working on statewide WAN/LAN architectures that will make VoIP feasible both within and between departments. NASTD has an enterprise architecture-working group, where members swap ideas on how to better unify state networks. Upgrades could include LANs that support virtual LAN (VLAN) and Power over Ethernet and WANs that support traffic-shaping and QoS.
IP PBXs abound
Meanwhile, in states without clear VoIP policies, installations of IP PBXs pop up because they meet the immediate needs of individual agencies. For example, in West Virginia, three departments use three different vendors because there is no overriding plan or standard for which vendor to use, said Carlos Neccuzi, IS specialist in the Department of Administration.
The state police use Nortel IP VoIP gear to connect more than 70 offices, some of which go unstaffed during parts of the day. The system is used to divert calls to offices where someone is on duty to answer. Similarly, the state’s department of highways has installed a Cisco IP PBX in its headquarters building and plans to extend the VoIP network to 10 district headquarters buildings.
Neccuzi’s own department has IP phones with a Toshiba system that was purchased to connect two offices by phone that were already connected by a data line. “We didn’t set out to do VoIP and ended up with a few phones anyway,” he said.
VoIP appears most often in facilities that are new because departments can readily install data networks that support VoIP at the outset. Maine has installed VoIP at a psychiatric center in Augusta and in the state’s new Public Safety office to handle emergency management services in case of disasters, said Ellen Lee, the state’s director of network services in the Department of Administrative and Financial Services.
In both cases, VoIP was chosen because the facilities were new, so the network was being built from scratch and could be designed to support the QoS needed for VoIP. As of this point, the state only uses VoIP within departments, not over the WAN, Lee said.
Virginia’s Department of Social Services and Department of Health both needed phone systems on short notice when they moved into new facilities. They bought Cisco IP phone systems because Cisco was an approved vendor they could buy from quickly, and no vendors of traditional PBXs were approved, said Ann Hardwick, associate director of Virginia Information Technologies Agency.
Pennsylvania has no sanctioned VoIP, because a statewide policy specifically forbids it and there is a mandate to use Centrex in all metropolitan areas. But agencies are challenging the policy because they want VoIP, said Valerie Long, the state’s network support services manager in the governor’s office of administration. “It’s our own fault because we don’t have a VoIP policy that’s been bought into by upper management,” she said.
Long said the state is looking into pilot VoIP programs that would include IP PBXs, as well as VoIP service from a carrier. The trials would be with a state agency that already had the network infrastructure to support the technology without an upgrade, she said.
Maine has to upgrade its infrastructure to support VoIP and map a plan. “The infrastructure needs to be there and solid first,” Lee said. When that will happen is uncertain because the state has not written a VoIP strategy.
Needs convincing
Some states are unconvinced of VoIP’s benefits. In New York, agencies can buy network and telephony services from the state’s Office for Technology. But so far VoIP is not a service the office offers, even though the demand is high, said Daniel Corcoran, director of the office’s division of telecommunications.
With all the state’s current PBXs at least IP-enabled, the office looks for opportunities to link them via IP as a way to save operational costs, he said. But some agencies demand those savings be passed along to them, something his department has not worked out yet. He said he’s not sure there will be large savings, if any at all.
“We have a sound rationale for not jumping into this,” Corcoran said. He is looking for agencies to demonstrate a need for VoIP based on its ability to support services that traditional phones can’t, but so far they haven’t come up with any. “We’re getting enormous pressure to do VoIP and we keep asking, ‘Why?’ “
