Keeping ahead of the curve

One of Australia’s leading educational institutions, Melbourne’s RMIT University, is currently laying the foundation for a $10 million dollar, campus-wide Unified Communications and multi-media network to serve more than 5000 staff and 60,000 students using an innovative education technology solution from networks provider Nortel.

The investment – a project being rolled out over 30 months – includes upgrading the network infrastructure and telephony system as well as other related services.

The new network will be built around Nortel’s flagship Communication Server (CS) 1000 IP PBX, serving 7000 endpoints and 5000 Nortel 1140e IP handsets. The CS 1000s will be installed across RMIT University’s three main campuses. Other components will include Nortel’s MCS 5100 for multimedia conferencing and Nortel Contact Center 6.0 for an IP-based help desk infrastructure. Nortel will also provide maintenance, integration and network optimisation from the Nortel Global Services portfolio.

“Our aim with this project is to keep the university well ahead of the curve for the new generation of technology- savvy students and to support innovation in teaching, learning and research,” said Allan Morris, executive director, IT services for RMIT.

Early benefits to RMIT University include phone number portability to keep staff connected, regardless of location on campus; integration with desktop ‘soft phones’ to make communication possible without physical handsets and ‘anytime, anywhere’ voice and video conferencing from desktop and laptop computers.

The implementation consists of two major aspects.

A crucial challenge to be overcome in the first instance concerned the aging telephony system the university had in place. “For the past 20 years we had been using an old Siemens phone system consisting of 5000 handsets across 12 PBX systems. It was becoming increasingly hard to obtain end-of-life parts for the system and a major refresh was very much in need,” Morris said.

These old phones are now being replaced with new Nortel IP telephone handsets, with the roll-out having already been extended to the university’s faculty and administration staff.

“Two years ago we very much felt that IP technology was too immature to go ahead with a full-scale implementation at the university, particularly with the large amount of handsets that we had,” said Morris. But after a thorough evaluation of the offerings available in the market, RMIT made the decision to go with Nortel in implementing IP phones, as well as a total refresh of its network.”

However, with some 12,500 PCs and about 500 servers running off one network over multiple sites, this was always going to be a big project, Morris said.

ahead collaboration curve keeping networking of the