New technologies help make IP telephony easier, cheaper, more secure


IP telephony vendors showcased their latest products at the annual ACUTA conference.

As more schools and colleges look to rout their phone calls and other communications over their IP network, a number of products and services are emerging that aim to make IP telephony easier to implement … and more secure.

Some of these new products and services were on display during the 40th annual conference of the Association for Information Communications Technology Professionals in Higher Education (ACUTA), held in Orlando April 3-6.

The Ontario-based company Phybridge, for instance, showcased what it called the world’s first network switch that lets you run IP telephony, unified communications, and Power over Ethernet service over a traditional telephone network—thereby saving bandwidth on your IP network, while leveraging your school’s investment in its original telecommunications infrastructure.

For years, Phybridge says, the telecommunications industry has believed that voice traffic was simply another application on an IP network—and that huge cost savings could be realized by having a single network handle both voice and data. But that undersells the challenges of handling the real-time requirements of voice traffic over an IP network, which can be significant.

“We believe that voice on data is the old way [of deploying IP telephony],” said Richard Kasslack, director of partner experience for Phybridge, “and that voice with data is the wave of the future.”

Phybridge’s UniPhyer switch reportedly provides digital signaling, as well as power, over a single-pair copper telephone line, with a range of up to 1,200 feet. It also allows for full duplex service, meaning that both parties on the call can speak at the same time—just as they can in a traditional phone call.

Among the colleges and universities reportedly using the product are Ohio State, Georgia Tech, Western State College, and Vermont Law School (VLS).

At VLS, officials wanted to move to a more modern communications infrastructure, but deploying unified communications over the school’s IP network would have required a significant network upgrade. Installing UniPhyer switches allowed VLS to realize the benefits of IP telephony over its existing copper infrastructure, while speeding up deployment considerably, said Technology Director Jeanne Eicks.

“We plugged in the new phones and unplugged the old ones. We started at 5 p.m., and by 10 p.m. the same evening, IP telephony was deployed,” Eicks said in a Phybridge-published case study.

Although IP telephony offers a number of possible benefits for schools, including the ability to integrate voice mail, eMail, and other communications within a single platform, voice-over-IP traffic is hard to secure using a traditional firewall or intrusion prevention system, because you have to open too wide a range of ports for voice traffic—which could expose your network to potential attacks.

As a result, many organizations that are moving to IP telephony have deployed a technology known as a session border controller (SBC), which controls the signaling and media streams involved in setting up and conducting telephone calls over an IP network. An SBC provides an added layer of security when making voice-over-IP calls.

One provider of SBC technology is Bedford, Mass.-based Acme Packet, which exhibited its Enterprise Session Border Controllers (E-SBCs) during the ACUTA conference.

“Acme Packet E-SBCs are … designed to address the full range of security, interoperability, and reliability challenges [that enterprises] often encounter when delivering IP telephony, interactive video, and unified communications across end-to-end IP networks,” the company said in a brochure.

Most schools use software from a company like Cisco or Nortel for running IP telephony over their networks, but to save money and allow for more customization, some schools and organizations are using an open-source alternative. One of the first and most popular of these open-source programs is Asterisk, created by Digium Inc. of Huntsville, Ala.

Digium was on hand at the ACUTA conference to discuss Asterisk, as well as the array of support and other services the company sells to complement the software.

When the University of Pennsylvania began a project to converge its voice and data onto a single, fiber-based network, campus officials turned to Asterisk to run its IP telephony.

“We needed a forward-looking solution, one that … could be flexible enough to be configured and extended by us, at a cost of operation that is no more than what we were currently incurring,” said Dikran Kassabian, senior technology director for the University of Pennsylvania’s Information Systems and Computing group, in a Digium-published case study.

Asterisk runs on the Linux, BSD Unix, and Mac OS X operating systems, and it’s compatible with nearly all standards-based telephony equipment using relatively inexpensive hardware, Digium says. It includes call conferencing, interactive voice response, call queuing, and unified messaging capabilities, as well as three-way calling and caller ID, and it supports the ADSI, SIP, and H.323 protocols.

Kassabian anticipates the software will enable UPenn to provide the best possible service at the least cost. He imagines a day when campus officials can provide integration from students’ wireless phones, so they can take advantage of no-charge dialing or access to university resources like calendars and other applications right from their phones.

“This is really the start of a larger project,” he said. “There is so much more we have in front of us in terms of modernizing [our] communication services. … We anticipate Asterisk will play a part in this effort.”

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