Michael Smith
IT/242 INTRO TO WAN TECHNOLOGIES
Instructor: SOKLY VANN
Week 2 VoIP Case Study
March 17, 2013
The case study I used was of the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Net Phone project. The case study was created to demonstrate that an open source approach to a campus wide VoIP can be cost effective and successful. The case study was conducted by Michael Palladino of the University of Pennsylvania. The University of Pennsylvania is a R1 research university, with 12 undergraduate and graduates schools, which includes a medical school, as well as hospitals in the Philadelphia area. They have over 22,000 students, with 7,500 living on campus. The health system has its own separate management; its IT division is mostly outsourced, with about 15,000 users. The schools operating budget is over $3 billion dollars.
When the company first contemplated going to a VoIP setup which was about 15 years ago, there was a vision of what the telecommunication needs of the customers was going to be like. They knew that in order to meet the research, academic and administrative needs of Penn in the 21st century, they needed to build a very robust IP infrastructure that both enhanced capacity and increased reliability of their data networks to support future IP‐video and IP‐telephony systems and services. Mainly because of growth of people and area as well as in technology. They began building their next generation Penn Net in 1999.
VoIP improved operations by lowering cost by; eliminating the annual cost of $200,000 for upgrading the aging cables/ conduits eliminated the $200,000 annual cost of doing MACs, it also sped up the time it took to complete MACs from 5-10 days to about 2 hours on VoIP. It eventually enabled the university to eliminate all contracted staff for an additional savings of $330,000 per year. It also assisted in cutting an additional $400,000 in the usage cost of telephone calls annually; it also lowered the cost of voicemail and...