December 2005 — Features

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VoIP to the Rescue

by Jacob Milner

Before CCSD moved toward VoIP, the district invested in a brand-new Gigabit Ethernet WAN designed specifically to speed computing over a district that spanned hundreds of miles. Philip Brody, the district’s assistant superintendent and CTO, had researched IP telephony for years, and he knew that it was critical for the district to set up a highbandwidth network before it forked over the money for VoIP. With this in mind, and working with technology integrator SAIC (www.saic.com), Brody set out in 2001 to buy and install all of the servers, switches, and routers necessary to make the WAN a reality. Nearly $17 million later, the WAN was ready for battle-testing.

That testing came in the form of VoIP, an effort that started in 2003. Much like Seher at DDSD, Clark County officials looked into rewiring every classroom, but opted for VoIP when officials saw just how expensive additional wires would be. As these officials met with consultants to investigate their options, they realized they could save thousands of dollars on maintenance and still manage to replace the bulk of the district’s phone system. According to Brody, after a lengthy request for proposals process, the winning option came in the form of a cooperative solution from Alcatel (www.alcatel.com) and Verizon (www.verizon.com).

“Once we had the WAN, we knew there were a lot of ways to skin the proverbial [telephony] cat,” Brody says of the district’s search for a new take on telephony. “How ironic was it that, for us, the ‘killer app’ was a 120-year-old technology delivered over the Internet?”

With the WAN in place, laying the foundation for the VoIP system was no challenge at all for CCSD. Buying the phones, however, was another story entirely. Naturally, CCSD didn’t purchase all 22,000 phones at once. Instead, the district set up a purchasing plan with Alcatel to buy 600 to 700 phones a month. Brody says the district has purchased products on this schedule for the last 30 months, and plans to continue at this pace for at least another six months. In all, he adds, the VoIP implementation has cost approximately $13 million so far, and should reach about $15 million overall, once all of the phones have been purchased and installed.

While Brody says he can’t estimate how much money VoIP will save the district on long distance, he admits that some of the biggest cost savings have come in the form of maintenance and support. In the past, when a school or facility experienced difficulty with a phone, the district had to dispatch its own phone technicians to troubleshoot or contract with a local company for help. Now, however, Brody says that since all phone traffic goes over the IP and all district IT staffers are trained for repairs on the WAN, maintenance is effected more quickly and more affordably than ever before, which frees up hundreds of thousands of dollars for other purchases.