Copiah-Lincoln Community College

Overview

Copiah-Lincoln Community College is a public comprehensive community college. Copiah-Lincoln organized during the summer of 1928, and opened for class that fall. In 1972, at the request of local and state officials, Copiah-Lincoln opened a branch in Natchez, Mississippi, to better meet the educational needs of the citizens of that area. Since that time, Copiah-Lincoln has continued to grow in size and prestige and now occupies a prominent position in the state's educational system with three campuses, an enrollment of nearly 3000, a staff of over 400, and a physical plant valued at more than $35 million. Copiah-Lincoln Community College now serves seven counties with a total population of over 154,000.

Challenge

JP McInnis, Director of Technology, was faced with a growing problem; Copiah Lincoln's existing patchwork of small key systems and Centrex lines was not able to keep up with the growth of the community college. The system had been patched together over the years revolving mostly around Centrex lines from BellSouth with on site systems providing some additional functionality. With more and more services from BellSouth added over the years, the telecom costs had gotten out of hand. Many features and services that were being charged were not being utilized or were no longer needed. It had become apparent to Mr. McInnis that the time had come for change. When initially considering a new phone system Copiah-Lincoln solicited quotes from other vendors including Nortel, Avaya, and Cisco Systems. Cisco proposed a solution utilizing their well-known Call Manager® software IP-PBX which runs on Windows and is generally deployed on Hewlett-Packard servers. The Cisco solution involved using a total of twelve servers across the three campuses at a cost between $200,000 and $350,000 depending upon options. Mr. McInnis and his team invested a great deal of time into considering the options from the major vendors, including a site visit to New Orleans to view the Avaya system in action.

Solution

After reviewing the available options JP decided that the IT department at Copiah-Lincoln Community College could easily deploy Asterisk software on Dell servers with Digium T1 interface hardware in an N+1 configuration for redundancy. Even though in some cases the interfaces on the Avaya system may have been slightly more refined, the flexibility of Asterisk allows any feature or functionality to implemented with great ease providing for both growth and custom applications. They also recognized that this solution would not only be initially more cost effective than the Cisco solution, but that the ongoing licensing costs would be much lower. Having decided upon a PBX infrastructure Copiah-Lincoln needed to decide upon a solution for phones. Copiah-Lincoln requisitioned numerous IP phones from various manufacturers for testing, including Sipura, Snom and Uniden. After a great deal of testing they decided to go with the Snom 190. After the bidding process but before the deployment was well underway the Snom 190 was dropped from the Snom product line to be replaced by the Snom 320. The Copiah-Lincoln team decided to proceed with the new phone instead. Mr. McInnis determined that the best roll-out procedure would be to take a conservative approach by deploying Asterisk starting with the smallest campus and moving to the other campuses in order of their size. The configuration at each campus was virtually identical using a single Dell PowerEdge 1850 rack mount server with a Digium TE110P T1 interface board and the Asterisk software with a third-party GUI called AMP (Asterisk Management Portal).

Implementation

The first campus to see deployment of the Asterisk system was the Simpson county campus which has about 40 phones. The deployment went smoothly and was completed quickly. After the success of the Simpson County deployment, JP and his team moved quickly to the larger Natchez campus which serves over 800 students with over 110 staff and over 100 phones and faxes. The biggest and final phase of the roll-out was the main campus at Wesson. With over 2000 students, 300 staff and right at 320 phones, this location was by far the largest of the three. The servers at each campus were linked together using IAX2 trunking over the existing high-speed network links between the campuses. The multiplexing technology of IAX2 allows the users at each campus to make a large number of simultaneous calls to other campuses, where previously only two had been possible with the tie lines from BellSouth. A single T1 PRI was procured from BellSouth for each of the campuses. Once these were provisioned and installed, the last step in each location was to shutdown the existing analog Centrex lines and switch the campus over to the Asterisk system.

Results

The voice over IP capabilities of Asterisk allow the schools to communicate over the high speed links that were already in place between the campuses. This allowed Copiah-Lincoln to remove the two tie lines between the three campuses after the deployment of the Asterisk software and Digium hardware was complete, realizing and immediate monthly savings of $768. A much larger savings was achieved by replacing all of the Centrex lines that were being leased from Bell South with a single ISDN Primary Rate Interface at each campus. JP McInnis estimates that the total cost savings in the first twelve months after deployment will be over $80,000 on carrier charges alone. The entire Asterisk deployment cost Copiah-Lincoln less than $78,000, meaning that the system will achieve payback in less than 12 months. Users of the phone system at Copiah-Lincoln have also benefited from a unified dialing plan. They now have four digit dialing system wide, where before they needed to dial the entire local number between campuses. A unified voice mail architecture and consistency across the phone system in general have led to less user frustration and increased productivity.