VoIP transition saves money while continuing to support legacy analog phones, fax machines and a variety of modem-based systems.

The Challenge

According to the old saying, it’s not the lions and tigers that you have to watch out for in the jungle – it’s the mosquitoes. The same can be true of VoIP. Often, organizations don’t have any problem at all using their IP network to carry voice. But unforeseen problems with ostensibly minor aspects of their communications environment wind up undermining their convergence plans.

That’s what almost happened with the Deer Valley School Unified District, which encompasses 37 schools spread across 400 square miles in the Phoenix, AZ vicinity. Because 60-70% of the District’s call volume was between its own facilities, VoIP made a lot of economic sense. In addition, the District already had three T-1 lines delivering a full 4.5Mbs of bandwidth to each location – so network capacity wasn’t going to present an issue.

The devil, it turned out, was in the details. While initiating some pilot testing, Dave Hatfield, the District Manager of Technical Services, began to notice some problems. The challenge was to integrate a variety of analog devices, including the District’s fax machines, as well as several of its facilities systems – such as those for energy management and the monitoring of its fire sprinklers – which communicated with the outside world via built-in modems.

"Replacing all of our fax machines and facilities systems would have been cost-prohibitive," says Hatfield. "So the only way we could move forward with VoIP and reap the substantial potential savings it offered us was to solve the other problems convergence presented us."

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