SIP in higher education

[Art Gaylord <>]

Hi,

I thought it might be of interest to some of you that we now have a SIP 
enabled phone on the one of our ships and have successfully made calls 
to and from it.  The R/V Atlantis is currently leaving Easter Island and 
heading to Tahiti. It is connected to the Internet via an (almost) 
always on satellite connection.   There is a phone attached to a Sipura 
3000 device on the ship which has been configured to connect to our 
Asterisk server at WHOI. So now the people on the Atlantis appear as an 
internal WHOI phone which the same dialing access as the people here and 
visa versa.  At the moment, we are still in a testing and use policy 
creation mode so the number is not published at this time.

Next steps will be to connect the Sipura to the onboard PBX and 
hopefully to try different SIP hardphones and softphones. Prior to this 
phones calls to/from the ships cost around $7-9/minute so were severely 
limited. Of course, there is still about a 750 msec. delay (ping time) 
to contend with.

By the way, we are by no means the first to do this and I only mention 
it because it is cool within the context of the SIP.edu community. Since 
an amazingly high percentage of the institutions who are currently part 
of SIP.edu also have oceanographic connections, it seems there is some 
potential for interesting experiments and experiences.

Art

--
Arthur S. Gaylord
Director, Computer and Information Services
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Woods Hole MA 02543


508-289-3329