Re: Message that JoAnn asked me to post

[Jeremy George <>]

  I agree that the Telecomm Dept. at the UofO raises some good points,
and thanks to Walt for permitting the discussion.

  Students here tell me that it's not uncommon for monthly long distance
charges to total $100 or more in calls to girl/boy friends at other
schools.  That's especially true for freshmen but also upper class
students.  So, for students I think the toll bypass issue isn't
trivial.

  The institutional perspective is very different.  Many schools buy
long distance minutes in bulk and retail them at a profitable markup.
Institutionally, long distance isn't a cost center, it's a profit center.
And, even today, it may be real money.

  The economic motive for telecomm departments is in the potential
reduction of costs for moves, adds and changes.  I've spoken to three
telecomm directors at schools roughly comparable to Yale and the
completely off-the-cuff estimate is that they *might* save a million
dollars a year with VoIP.  Your mileage, of course, will vary.  Too,
VoIP eliminates the "telecomm delay."  You want to move an IP phone;
just pick it up and start walking.

  That's the easy part, though.  The point made in the last couple
of paragraphs in re where is the private sector may lead to a more
interesting discussion.  The private sector *is* involved in VoIP with
a passion.  The question is where is the academic sector?  I've only
seen one other school represented at Voice On the Net.  All of the
major private sector players are there: Cisco, Microsoft, Level3, WCom,
Nortel, etc.

  The I2 community has a tremendous opportunity to partner with the
private sector development community.  They are in real need of testing
and feedback in real world deployments.  But, this is a circumstance
where the private sector appears to be way out in front of the academic
community.  IMO, if we are to play a meaningful role in VoIP development,
we need to have a much better understanding of where development is going
than we seem to have now.  VoIP is only one element of it.  The movement
is to Unified Communications, and Microsoft is firing the first real shot
this Fall.  But AOL will fire the second soon after.

- Jeremy


>Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2001 20:19:02 -0500
>From: Walt Magnussen 
><>
>To: 
>
>Subject: Message that JoAnn asked me to post
>
>Members,
>
>   I was asked by Joanne Hugi of the University of Oregon to post the 
> following message.  It askes some good questions.  I think that a part of 
> my answer is that we are more interested in the VOIP trunking over abilene 
> and ultimately the connection of native H.323 and SIP devices in a reliable 
> fashion.
>
>   Our trial intends to use multicast gatekeeper peering to try to avoid  
> the scaling issues that Joanne mentions.  Interoperability is only a small 
> part of what we are looking at.  Again this is a testbed and is intended to 
> help us answer some of the questions that were asked.
>
>Here is the initial message.  Other comments welcome.
>
>Hi Ted, Greg, Walt
>
>Could one of you post my message below to the listserv for VoIP?
>
>thanks
>
>Joanne
>
>>Return-path: 
>><>
>>Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2001 12:04:07 -0700
>>From: Joanne Hugi 
>><>
>>Subject: comments on the I2 VoIP project
>>X-Sender: 
>>
>>To: 
>>
>>Cc: 
>>
>>Original-recipient: rfc822;hugi
>>
>>Hi Walt
>>
>>The Networking and Telecommunications staff at the University of Oregon
>>have voiced the following concerns/issues with the project proposed.
>>
>>Learning about different equipment interoperability issues or even the
>>administration of multiple gatekeepers from the same manufacturer is an
>>interesting project and we can see where it can have significant
>>application for higher ed institutions either within intranets or
>>between sites of the same or partner institutions using I2 or commodity
>>bandwidth.
>>
>>We question, though, whether it makes sense for multiple higher ed
>>institutions to essentially try to replicate the pstn backbone with new
>>technology when long distance rates are already so low as to be almost
>>free for domestic calling. Unless gatekeepers have become devices which
>>can learn of changes to the mapping of IP addresses to phone numbers as
>>they are added or subtracted by individual endpoint gatekeepers, it
>>means replicating a system that already works very well and is very
>>labor intensive, requiring great communication and coordination across
>>the members of the network. Even if gatekeepers are now able to learn
>>this type of information from each other it is still a complex technical
>>and administrative undertaking with much room for screw ups to reduce
>>the quality of a service which our user communities expect to work
>>flawlessly.
>>
>>So, if the object is interoperability testing this seems like a good
>>thing, although isn't it something that the vendor community should be
>>doing more of as well?
>>
>>If the object is replicating the long distance network for calls between
>>schools (and ultimately hop off to local communities) what is the
>>service or economic justification?
>>
>>Regards
>>
>>Joanne R. Hugi
>>Associate Vice President Information Services
>>Computng Center
>>1225 Kincaid Street
>>University of Oregon
>>Eugene, OR 97403-1212
>>541.346.1702 (voice)
>>541.346.4397 (FAX)
>>541.953.7104 (Cell)
>>http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~hugi/
>>
>>
>

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