We have 500 people on our voice-over-IP system, so we’ve really moved beyond the pilot stage to the service stage, and we’re ramping up to 1,500 users in the next couple of months, and to be a VoIP campus not too many years from now, MIT plans to switch all 15,000 of its phones to VoIP.

We’ve got it going in the IT department, since you’ve got to eat your own dog food. (Some people asked if it was really wise that the phone path to the IT department would use VoIP, but we told them if the network is down, we know.)

One of the arguments for having us do it by department or building is that the hard part is getting our 5ESS [phone switch] people to manually route their phone numbers to us so that people can keep their phone numbers (putting new employees on the VoIP system is much simpler, as the school uses a common name space and via a Web administration page can set up new end users with a Session Initiation Protocol address that’s the same as the e-mail address).

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