SIP in higher education

[(Dennis Baron)]

SIP.edu Conference Call September 8, 2005

*Attendees*

Dennis Baron, MIT
Candace Holman, Harvard
Arthur Gaylord, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute
John Steir, Stony Brook University
Ben Teitelbaum, Internet 2
Mike Van Norman, UCLA
John Todd, Tello
Chris Trown, University of Oregon

*Discussion*

Today's call begins with John Steir discussing his current situation
- he's relatively new to SIP.edu and is looking to get up to speed
as quickly as possible. He's interested in an Avaya solution, and is
willing to spend money on an off-the-shelf system to avoid setting up
a something on his own. John has no particular attachment to Avaya, but
has been looking around at various systems. He mentions that with Cisco,
his experience is that they tend to work through system integrators,
while Avaya deals more directly with customers.

Dennis mentions the Harvard cookbook entry about Avaya, and Candace
mentions that they had luck with Avaya and LDAP integration, something
that John would consider important. John says he will study the cookbook
and formulate more specific questions.

Chris Trown mentions that Oregon uses a SER proxy - they looked at Avaya,
but were turned off by the per-seat license cost of approximately $25 -
$30 per seat. They are currently experimenting with a home-brewed system
consisting of a customized SER which routes a block of calls via a Cisco
gateway. Currently, though, there is no voicemail. They have an Avaya
voicemail system, which is very proprietary and tied to their other
offerings, but going with an all-Avaya system would be very expensive.

MIT is looking at Asterisk for voicemail, but it isn't looking as
promising as originally anticipated. Scalability is an issue at Oregon,
with 8500 users. Art Gaylord is using Asterisk at WHOI for approximately
50 people, with a maximum future deployment of about 1000 - they
anticipate no problems. WHOI has done about 30 simultaneous connections
with no more than 10% CPU usage, Oregon says it might see about 50
connections at a time. John Todd mentions that he has has worked with
Asterisk installations servicing tens of thousands of voicemail users;
with the most advanced codec, they can run about 100 calls on a dual 3
GHz Xenon box; voicemail only might allow more than this, depending on
the filesystem configuration.

Two concerns that Chris mentions with Asterisk voicemail are the  limit
of 99 messages, and that users can send voice email but there is no way
to coordinate deletion of  voice and email messages. John mentions that
the 99 message limit is governed by a line in the configuration file and
is user configurable. The deletion of voice email is confusing, but some
configurations send email containing a pointer to the audio file a web
interface that allow users to delete messages; this interface is crude,
but comes with Asterisk.

Following this, discussion focuses on Google and the recently announced
Googletalk service. Discussion centers on the service's future SIP plans
and federation with other organizations. Currently only Googletalk users
can be contacted, and artificial boundaries prevent contact with other
Jabber users or SIP users at other institutions. The main question is if
Google will open up their network when it becomes advantageous to do so,
and would this allow peering with anyone? There is also discussion about
Google and Internet2 membership - Ben mentions that there has been talk,
specifically regarding the Google Print initiative, but it is difficult
to get information from them.

Dennis asks if anyone is going to the fall member meeting. There is a
SIP.edu session on Monday at 3:15, email about this will follow.

Ben asks about Tellme, and if anyone has considered working with
them or sponsoring them for CENIC connectivity. Mike Van Norman says
they haven't really thought about it, and they are limited in address
space and therefore couldn't sponsor them at this time. Since they are
physically located in Sunnyvale, they might consider talking to Stanford
or Berkeley. Dennis asks participants to consider what sort of Voice
XML applications they might be interested in developing with Tellme.

Due to the member meeting, the next call will be in three weeks, on
September 29th.