Open source VoIP hits the Ivy League

Open source tools such as Asterisk and SIP Enterprise Router are facing their biggest test yet at the University of Pennsylvania, where deployment of a 15,000-seat VoIP network based on these open source VoIP telephony servers is rolling along. Deke Kassabian, the university's senior technology director for information systems and computing, plans to grow that installed base by a factor of more than 10 over the next five years. The infrastructure Kassabian and his team built is designed for high-availability VoIP, with redundant connections to IP call and feature servers, public switched telephone network and IP telephony service provider point-of-presence links. Like many large organizations converging voice and data networks, consolidating the school's telecom and data network teams helped tremendously.