July 9, 2007

VoIP Hung Up on College Campus?

By Jim Barthold

It says something about current VoIP deployments that a college campus, the fermenting point for innovation and techno-geeks, will use the technology as just another way to efficiently deliver phone calls.

With all the talk about the wonders of IP communications for TV and mobile and advanced high-speed data, it would seem that VoIP on a college campus might be more exciting than VoIP in Podunk, KS. For starters, it isn't.

The University of Massachusetts (UMass) at Amherst inked a five-year "research and deployment" deal with VoIP switching vendor Cedar Point Communications to offer VoIP services to a generation of kids who, unlike the folks in Podunk, have never seen a rotary phone outside a museum.

For the first year or so of this deal, they won't be getting anything their parents can't get. UMass Amherst would probably outsize Podunk, what with its 12,000 resident students and 28,000-plus on-and-off campus players during school hours. For the IT staff at UMass, VoIP means replacing some old Ericsson voice switches and then looking at what else can be accomplished.

"Despite some misconceptions that public schools are not cutting edge and future-thinking institutions (propagated, no doubt, by the elitist, sports-lacking graduates of those ivy-draped private schools), what we're talking to UMass about and what they've done in terms of applications that they're going to offer in the next six, 12, 18 and 36 months far exceeds anyone's imagination," said George Kassas, founder and executive vice president of Cedar Point Communications."

Logically, with all hype aside, the first consideration for UMass is to "keep completing phone calls when they want to," said Kassas. Just as logically, that means starting on the ground floor with VoIP service and soft phones for 900 kids in a residence hall. Unlike some cable operators, the innovation won't stop in the dorm.

More for the students

"We're looking at a way for a student to own a phone number for the four years that they're with us and trying to add value with cell phones," said Daniel Blanchard, associate chief information officer at UMass Amherst. "We'd like to play with dual-mode phones with Wi-Fi VoIP."

Refreshingly, Blanchard admitted "we're not really certain what we're doing ... but the mobile part of this is to try to engage more with our student population or add some value to their telephone experience while they're on campus."

UMass has a WiMAX license and is in drawing-board stages of how that will play into the IP space.

The potential of a vendor-university collaboration is intriguing. Of course, the product must be there so kids can make calls and the university can charge them for those calls; but a university is an incubator, a place where fertile minds are plowed with new ideas.

First things first

"There are a lot of things that we could explore, (but) really where we are now is installing it in a piece of our residence hall and expecting to roll that out," said Blanchard. "This is mostly a service that we provide."

Another service that Cedar Point hopes to help colleges provide is a targeted early notification system that goes beyond sending messages to cell phones or laptops because in a real emergency, too many of those devices are turned off.

The plan is to use "an end device that plugs into any currently available telephone jack (and) will emit a message in English, a very intensive tone and a very pitching light indoor and outdoor," Kassas said.

Because VoIP is zoned, the messages can be aimed with messages specific to the situation in those areas. The devices eventually will also be used with a WiMAX signal, Kassas said.

"In pleasant times, it will show the score of the sports team and happenings on the university. In emergency times, they will broadcast exact messages to every exact end point," he said. "It's a subject to be discussed for months to come, but we believe it's a solid, feasible step."

Internet2

In another case of bridging the practical with the leading edge, Associate CIO Blanchard is in the Internet2 movement, of which UMass Amherst is a founding member. Internet2 is a university-based effort to provide next-gen production services as well as a platform to develop new networking ideas and protocols via a variety of bandwidth-intensive applications under development in campus and research labs today.

"Cedar Point either has or is in the process of doing Internet2 as a corporate member, (and) we're very interested in working with other Internet2 members," said Blanchard.

Of course, that's all in the future. In September, the seeds of VoIP will be sown for students at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst where, who knows, something really interesting might grow in the next four or five years. Beats planting wheat in Podunk.

- Jim Barthold