Pingtel announces that The University of the Arts has selected Pingtel’s SIPxchange ECS to support 3,500 phones for faculty, staff, and students at its Philadelphia campus. The SIPxchange rollout begins from the student residential buildings that are connected to the campus gigabit backbone and will ultimately include all administrative and academic properties and offices currently served by The University of the Arts’ Fujitsu9600 ES PBX system. The new all SIP solution will provide The University of the Arts with a robust, redundant VoIP system that is easy to use and manage, and costs that are drastically lower than that of the competition.

“We looked at similar systems from a variety of vendors including Cisco and Avaya, but were quickly put off by their high costs, which were almost double that of SIPxchange ECS,” said Jeffrey Basoff, Director of Network Services at The University of the Arts. “We also considered implementing Digium’s version of Asterisk, but it does not scale as well as SIPxchange for the enterprise deployment. We have a small open-source Asterisk environment in production where some convenient features will be utilized and integrated with SIPxchange.”

The University of the Arts is taking advantage of the superior architecture of SIPxchange ECS by utilizing the redundant high availability option, which provides system load-balancing, performance scalability, and failover capabilities. The native all SIP architecture of SIPxchange ECS also enhances cost savings by allowing The University of the Arts to use any phone, gateway, server, or firewall product that is SIP compatible. Pingtel supports the entire solution, providing one point of contact for any concern.

“We already had the important infrastructure components needed to execute a successful transition and build a reliable VoIP environment within the campus data network,” explained Ms. Basoff. “A gigabit network and backbone, redundant OSPF routing design, Microsoft Windows 2003 Active Directory services, robust e-mail messaging architecture that is on the path to unified messaging, VoIP outgoing trunks for long-distance, separation of voice and data VLANS, network and perimeter security framework utilizing Cisco ASA, intrusion prevention systems, and the open source IDS sensors across the campus existed prior to the purchase of Pingtel’s SIPxchange ECS solution. The Linux servers that host SIPxchange connect to the PSTN through Cisco 2800 integrated service routers configured as SIP/PSTN gateways.”

“The University of the Arts deployment exemplifies the core capabilities of SIPxchange ECS—scalability, compatibility, robustness, support, and ease of use,” said William J. Rich, President and CEO of Pingtel. “These advantages, combined with the cost savings associated with an open source VoIP solution, will allow The University of the Arts to efficiently and cost effectively maintain a cutting-edge communications system now, and in the future.”