| » About NACS |
Friday July 25th, 2008 |
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| » About NACS |
Friday July 25th, 2008 |
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Summary: Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a technology that allows you to make telephone calls over the Internet instead of your regular telephone line. NACS is evaluating VoIP solutions for the campus.
Voice over IP (VoIP), which is sometimes referred to as IP Telephony or a converged voice/data network, is an increasingly popular way to provide telephone services in a large enterprise like UCI. Rather than have completely separate systems and communications infrastructure for providing telephone and network services, VoIP provides telephone service on a standard IP data network. There are different types of VoIP telephone services. The type of VoIP that NACS is currently evaluating is referred to as “enterprise” VoIP, which is a NACS-managed telephone system that uses vendor-specific IP telephones that operate on UCInet. An enterprise IP telephone system is designed to support a large enterprise such as UCI. The other type of VoIP is Internet-based IP telephone services offered by an increasing number of commercial service providers such as Vonage, www.vonage.com, and Skype, www.skype.com. These services operate on the commercial Internet and are not currently suitable replacements for an enterprise telephone system.
Beginning in November 2004 NACS began providing IP telephone service to our clients in select locations while NACS continues to evaluate the new service, resolve some technical issues, and to work on our strategic plan to eventually replace the existing Ericsson campus telephone system. Currently, NACS is only offering the service to our clients in the Calit2 building. The telephones in Calit2 are IP telephones provided by Cisco and based on Cisco’s IP Telephony Solution. The Cisco IP Telephony Solution is connected to the Ericsson campus telephone system and provides many of the same features offered by the Ericsson system. However, there are differences in the way the new IP telephones operate, and NACS is working to resolve some feature interoperability issues between the Ericsson telephones and the Cisco IP telephones. Refer to the following link for details: http://www.nacs.uci.edu/telephone/IPfeatures.html
NACS has been evaluating and testing IP telephone service since 2002 as part of a pilot project. We have investigated many vendor solutions, but have evaluated and tested solutions from Ericsson, our current telephone system provider, and from Cisco, our current data network provider. As of April 2005, about 10% of NACS staff, and all of our clients in Calit2, are using Cisco IP telephones. NACS was motivated to gain IP telephony experience because the existing telephone system will need to be replaced within the next 5-10 years (2010-2015), and because NACS believes, and virtually all telephone system providers agree, that all telephone systems of the future will be IP-based. It is no longer a question of will our future telephone system be IP-based, it is a question of how quickly will we migrate from the current Ericsson system to an IP-based system.
