[August 18, 2005] VoIP Goes to College: GUPS Enables Free Calling Tweet BY JOHANNE TORRES TMCnet VoIP Minute Watch Columnist For colleges and universities that have multiple campuses and numerous student and faculty housing dormitory halls wanting to lower high telecom bills, VoIP seems to score a 4.0 GPA. In fact, VoIP system deployment adoption and technology integration is a growing trend within these higher education institutions. Organizations currently using VoIP-based telecom systems include Texas A&M University (TAMU) through Internet2; Concordia University’s CallManager system with Cisco IP phones; Stockholm University through Alcatel; University of California, Berkeley through Interactive Intelligence for IP-based voicemail; and Harvard University’s Information Systems department using Cisco System's AVVID architecture, just to name a few. Encouraging the free flow of information between academic establishments like these worldwide, in comes the Robertson Education Empowerment Foundation (REEF). The foundation announced today it launched an initiative that will link university phone systems to enable calling to and between colleges. The new Global University Phone System (GUPS) provides Linux software and hardware to link traditional phone networks via the Internet to enable free calling between universities and any Internet-connected PC. "With GUPS, universities can experience substantial cost savings by making calls to other universities over the internet connections they are already paying for, which reduces their telecom bills," says REEF director Tina Donaldson. "Equally as important as cost savings is the removal of barriers to encourage the free flow of knowledge from any PC in the world to university campus phones and vice versa free of charge." According to the announcement released today, the GUPS Initiative "provides universities with a VoIP system they can easily install and configure to connect their phone networks with other academic institutions around the globe. Calls then travel over the internet using VoIP thus bypassing traditional telecommunication charges for phone calls and connecting universities to the rapidly expanding VoIP community." UC San Diego, UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine, University of Oklahoma, University of Philippines and Brigham Young University are currently beta testing call routing services as part of the program pilot. "We have routed more than 10,000 minutes since June. The implementation of this system was easy and the call quality was great. We are investigating expanding VoIP offerings to the campus community," says Elazar Harel, assistant vice chancellor of administrative computing and telecommunications at UCSD, who led the university's activities on this project. According to GUPS’ announcement, "all calls through GUPS adhere to the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) approved SIP standard. The SIP protocol is an open standard, so calls can be made not just between participating campuses, but also between any software or hardware telephony device that supports SIP. Universities are able to distribute free VoIP software to students and affiliates such as Gizmo Project or to deploy SIP based digital phone devices such as WiFi phones, all of which can make free calls to campus numbers. GUPS participants are supplied with necessary software and hardware to connect their existing phone system at no cost from REEF. A secure Linux based PC is provided along with Asterisk software, a multi-protocol open source PBX. Free technical support and monitoring is provided by SIPphone. Education Empowerment Foundation, Global University Phone System GUPS http://aboutreef.org/gups Johanne Torres is contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more articles by Johanne Torres, please visit: http://www.tmcnet.com/tmcnet/columnists/columnist.aspx?id=100006&nm=Johanne% 20Torres [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]