Deke Kassabian, the university's senior technology director for information systems and computing, plans to grow that installed base by a factor of more than 10 over the next five years. Driving the project is the desire to get off costly Centrex monthly fees and infrastructure, and the promise of an open source, standards-based VOIP infrastructure that provides superior integration and control.

"If we can run one modern IP network for voice, video and data .... there's a clear win," Kassabian says. "If we provide business telephony internally, less money leaves the university."

The Linux-based SER call control and Asterisk messaging servers were a better fit with UPenn's standard back ends for authentication (Kerberos and RADIUS), its OpenLDAP directory structure, and e mail. While commercial IP PBXs are adaptable to these platforms, "they don't work that way out of the box" typically, he adds.

With open source running extensively throughout the university -- from directories, to e-mail, DHCP and DNS -- the level of expertise in open source troubleshooting and development was there to support the Asterisk plans, Kassabian says.

"For years UPenn has had a strong open source talent pool. As a result, we have the staff and expertise to develop and roll out open source VOIP."

UPenn's work with the Asterisk community is also paying off by improving the product itself. University programmers have already contributed to two additions to the code base, which is now supported in the main release. One change integrates IMAP-based voice mail and messaging stores, and another involves improvements in SMDI signaling between IP phones and voice-mail system back end.

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