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Uni Takes On Open Source VoIP |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Friday, 24 March 2006 |
Brisbane’s University of Queensland has decided to deploy an Asterisk-based VoIP system over it’s multi-campus fibre network.
The Uni also plans to investigate the possibility of making the service available over its recently installed wireless network. According to a report in ComputerWorld the University has successfully integrated an Asterisk server with its traditional DM PCS and is now investigating the systems’ presense functionality.
Scott Sinclair from the university's strategic technologies group told Computerworld the VoIP system would help reduce call costs, especially to the University’s external campuses which are already linked in a fibre optic network.
"We have a commercial ISP as part of the University so providing commercial VoIP with Asterisk would be good," Sinclair said. "We're looking at a number of products but the easy and inexpensive way to get into [VoIP] is with open source."
"We only have a small deployment but it's been successful so far. Being able to advertise the multiple places where you are is a powerful feature,", he said.
The Asterisk system consists one x86 server running Red Hat Linux, but only about 10 people are using Asterisk so far. The University plans to begin a pilot project with one of the residential colleges to supply VoIP to students' rooms. This will involve some 200 users.
Ultimately the service could be rolled out to as many as 5500 staff and 35,000 students using their University-supplied e-mail as their phone number.
"It's conceivable for each student to have a phone number [and] that could be rolled out now, it's just a case of finding apps that will use it," he said. "Students won't have to pay a toll and since every student gets a local call dial-up account, they could make calls from home. You don't need CD quality for voice."
Enterprise level Asterisk deployments are pretty rare, but as larger organisations begin to tinker with the software, they are helping to work bugs out of the system. UQ has found one such bug and worked cooperatively with the Asterisk development team to fix it.
Asterisk's place in UQ's design is to provide features like voicemail, queues, auto attendants, and call access control. Either Cisco or NEC SIP-PSTN gateways will be used because they use hardware for transcoding media streams, and another open source product, SER (SIP Exchange Router), or Cisco Call Manager 5 as the SIP proxy-registrar, said the story.
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