When Concordia College was upgrading its LAN from shared 10M bit/sec Ethernet to switched Gigabit Ethernet, Verizon approached the school with this proposition: How about running more than just data over the revamped network?

"I told them if I didn't have to pay any more for voice over IP, I'd be willing to [try] it," says Brian Heinemann, dean of IT at the Ann Arbor, Mich., school, which was using Verizon to manage its aging NEC PBX. "I didn't think they could do it, but they kept coming back with bids."

Verizon got the contract, and earlier this month the school switched 100 of its 400 phones to a Cisco equipment-based IP Centrex service, with plans to convert the other phones over time based on student demand.

Once sold on VoIP, Heinemann quickly realized that outsourcing was his only option. His data staff is small and he lacks any sort of convergence expert. What's more, he couldn't duplicate in-house the round-the-clock network monitoring Verizon offered.

Concordia faced the same decision every other new VoIP user confronts: Whether to do it yourself, outsource it or do a little of each. The usual arguments about cost, staffing and network ownership come into play with VoIP as they do with any other network technology that might be outsourced, but there also are issues unique to VoIP that can affect the decision. Such factors include the lack of staff trained on voice and data technologies, and the need to keep a particularly sharp eye on bandwidth usage given the sensitive nature of voice traffic.

Quality question remains for VoIP
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Answers to your VoIP questions
Part 4 of this series

Among those opting for an in-house approach is the El Monte Union High School District near Los Angeles. The district installed a Mitel IP PBX to handle 500-plus phones in 10 facilities connected by a Gigabit Ethernet metropolitan-area network (MAN). The phones use a single dialing plan and are managed from one site, with voice traffic confined to virtual LANs.

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The school district decided against outsourcing after it had bad experiences with Pacific Bell Centrex service, says Garett McKay, director of technology for the city of El Monte.

"We were dealing with a lot of problems in getting our carrier to respond in a timely fashion," McKay says of the Centrex service. The district already had dumped Pacific Bell's Centrex service in favor of Toshiba telephone key systems in each school, but they weren't ideal in that they required site visits to maintain.