Transcript Migrating from Centrex to IP Telephony at Penn

Migrating from Centrex to
IP Telephony at Penn
Deke Kassabian
University of Pennsylvania
ISC Networking &
Telecommunications
About Penn
• University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy
League university in Philadelphia
• 20,000 students (undergraduate & graduate)
• 4,000 faculty & 13,000 staff
• 250 buildings
• 30 RDPs (telephony points of presence)
• 23,000 phone lines & 41,000 IP addresses
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Telecommunications
Some Background
• Networking & Telecom organization merger
in 2000, with full integration over the
course of the following four years
• Environment: Centrex +Penn-owned cable
• 4 exchanges, 1 area code
• 5 digit dialing on campus
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Business Drivers
• Aging voice cable infrastructure and voice
mail components
• Moves/adds/changes – inflexible and costly
• Wish to increase operational efficiencies
• Prefer vendor independence
• Prefer open standards
• Prefer open source
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Telecommunications
The Organization
• Consciously avoided silos through integration of
Data/Voice staff with similar jobs
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Operations
Engineering, New Service Development
Finance and Billing
Customer Service
• Some staff reductions took place
• New organization is fully integrated, and
increasingly well cross-trained
• New organization also includes Video group
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Considering our Next Steps
• Wanted to make a business move to deliver
highly flexible and cost-effective telephony
with a longer horizon
• Had a track record of success with open
source communications software
• What would it take to seriously pursue this
approach?
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The Breakthrough
• Project launch meeting with managers &
team leads
• Identified biggest issues
• Committed significant local staff resources
• Hired project manager
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Project Teams
Steering
Committee
Technical
Facilities
Process
Business
Network
Architecture
Installations
Operations
Application
Architecture
Intake
Support
Telephony
Architecture
Billing
Provisioning
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Communications
Internal Pilot Campus Pilot
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Roll out production pilot within our own
department
Structure installations to be cookie cutter
Train Centrex staff to be VoIP specialists
Start punch-list management
Continue to evaluate and adjust
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Challenges
• “Recruiting” pilot customers
– That fit the service profile
– That are in a suitable building
– That are willing to work with a pilot, providing
useful feedback
• Supportable Handsets
– Single line & multi line sets
– Multiple Manufactures
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Open Source Strategy
• Avoid over-customization
– Use existing functionality where possible
– Maintain active relationship with developers
– Try to get any essential changes built back into
mainline code
• Notable Asterisk customization
– IMAP access to voice mail message store for true
unified messaging
– Penn developed extension to Asterisk, likely to be
included in 1.4 with Summer 2006 release
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Current State of Service
• Production-grade
– Redundant servers, gateways and PRIs
– Single-line features, email/voicemail
integration
– 911 support equal to legacy system
• layer 2 QoS, separate VLANs & subnets
• Full service- installation, support & billing
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VoIP Topology
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Campus-wide Pilot Rollout
1200
1000
800
600
VoIP Pilot
VoIP Actual
400
200
0
Jul05
Nov
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Jan
Mar
May
Jul06
Jul07
Success
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400+ subscribers, 500 scheduled by June
Network Architecture Team
Process re-engineering
Site/server failover recovery
Open-source software (SER, Asterisk)
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Telecommunications
Penn iPhone Web Services
(Phase 1.0)
Self-service
Voice mail
Change Email
Password
Do Not Disturb
Call Forward
Reject Anon.
Blocked Caller ID
More . . .
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ISC Networking &
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Lessons Learned
• Pilot one technology at a time (open-source vs. in
house commercial vs IP centrex)
• Deliver service components in phases, to
compatible customers
• Create/maintain a voice development environment
• Use Centrex staff to manage VoIP installations
• Pilot support services & involve customers
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Telecommunications
Recommendations
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Make project a priority across the organization
Deliver a production pilot
Cross-train staff, and allow time for adjustment
Augment staff with consultants in key areas
Technology is evolving: let current state determine
project scope
ISC Networking &
Telecommunications
Migrating from Centrex to IP
Telephony at Penn
Deke Kassabian
University of Pennsylvania
ISC Networking &
Telecommunications