New College, Durham likes to keep ahead of the curve on technology. It's installing a system that will save money by letting staff use mobile phones to make calls over the college Wi-Fi network.
"We're at the beginning of a long journey," says Alan Race, assistant director of ICT and purchasing at the college, which has around 16,000 full- and part-time students on degree-level and vocational courses, and employs about 500 people - some of whom are now getting Wi-Fi equipped cellphones that connect to the phone system through a fixed-mobile convergence appliance from DiVitas Networks.
Voice on IP systems are widely used, and wireless LANs are commonplace, but few companies have extended telephony onto their wireless LAN yet, even though this would allow staff to work more flexibly within the campus, using a mobile handset as their regular PBX extension wherever they are. It can also save money, since staff would no longer make cellular calls on campus.
Network managers have steered clear of voice on Wi-Fi so far, because the technology has been untried, the handsets bulky and power-hungry, and implementations have imposed unpopular devices and awkward user interfaces on the user. At the same time, mobile operators have been steering users away from the technology by making better deals for corporate cellphones.
New College was in a better position than many to take the plunge, since it already has a well-established converged network, using Cisco's Call Manager VoIP PBX. It was one of the first UK colleges to adopt IP telephony, and converged voice and data in 2004, during a £35 million campus renovation.
Telindus, the network services company that put this network in, added a reliable Wi-Fi LAN from Trapeze in 2006, with around 55 access points that cover the campus. "That went in without a hiccup," says Race.
Convergence for £100 per user ... more>>>
