The Washington State University main campus is in Pullman on the eastern side of the state, with a small Government Relations office on the western side in the state capital, Olympia. Telephone services had been provided from a legacy PBX located in a nearby building using a proprietary VoIP solution that had been added to the PBX.
The call quality was so bad that connections were constantly being dropped, and finally university administrators asked that the Olympia office not participate in conference call, since it was so disruptive. That brought a request to IT Services to fix the problem by implementing a new system. As part of the requirements, the office did not want to lose any functionality including caller ID, access to the state telephone network for long-distance needs, five- digit dialing to other WSU locations and voicemail.
WSU implemented a small Cisco Integrated Services Router (ISR) running Call Manager Express (CCME). It had all the capabilities needed and included voice mailboxes. A member school of ACUTA, the Association for Information Communications Technology Professionals in Higher Education, they already had a VoIP gateway connected to the main telephone switch for use by other locations calling the system.
The equipment was installed in Pullman for testing and several phones were installed in Olympia for staff evaluation. One of the first tests was to place calls back-to-back from the phones on the old system and the new Cisco phones. There was a noticeable improvement in quality even though the ISR had not been moved to Olympia. The staff soon realized this and quickly became dependent on the Cisco phones to the point that it became difficult to take the router down for further development.
The next challenge was to arrange for connections at Olympia. Because of demands for caller and calling ID along with capabilities the LEC could provide, it was finally decided to install PRI service, even though this would result in much more capacity than was needed. This also provided the capabilities needed for E911.
The final step was to connect to the state telephone network, known as “SCAN.” This would have been expensive to connect to in Olympia and WSU already had a SCAN connection to its remote switch in Spokane to serve another customer. The Olympia switch was programmed to allow access through the Spokane connection. The only challenge here was that special arrangements had to be made on the main PBX to allow calls to the local Spokane area, since SCAN would not allow local calls.
The equipment is now installed in Olympia, the system is in production and the Government Relations employees are very happy with the service. Going forward, WSU is looking to begin a migration to VoIP with new buildings coming online in 2009 as well as a research station in Wenatchee that has funding for a replacement system to deal with emergency notification issues. Once this conversion is started and more capable servers are installed in Pullman, the Olympia office will be migrated to run from Pullman with the ISR in place to provide backup should the network fail.
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