Sat, February 01, 2003 — CIO — On Sept. 11, 2001, the phone company’s central switching station serving the headquarters of New York City’s Department of Sanitation (DSNY) was crushed by the collapse of the Towers. The very agency with line responsibility for the Herculean cleanup effort that would soon be required suddenly found itself unable to communicate with its offices and personnel. Even worse, DSNY headquarters soon learned it was on its own so far as restoring service was concerned; its telecom provider?Verizon?had its own wounds to look after. But the Sanitation Department’s commissioner made his needs clear to MIS Director Steven Stam: He wanted his telephones back immediately, whether it was possible or not.

Fortunately Stam had a few functional assets, including a reasonably robust LAN and the knowledge that there was a fiber data line running through the building that did not terminate at the destroyed Verizon facility. Strictly speaking, the fiber didn’t belong to his department (it was leased by the Department of Health), but these were unusual times ("I begged, I borrowed, I was accused of stealing," Stam remembers), and by Monday, Sept. 24, he had started to lash those together to support a voice-over-IP (VoIP) network?using the LAN to carry phone calls and support a gateway into the public switched telephone network (PSTN). By the following Monday he received the go-ahead for the rollout, and the new phones began to ring one week later. With technical help from Dimension Data (a networking infrastructure services company in Reston, Va.), Stam had 285 VoIP phones running throughout the department’s headquarters. Today, with 600 phones in three buildings on the new system, Stam is beginning to refocus on more traditional IS issues, such as tracking the reduction in costs. "Fifty percent of our phone calls are internal," he says. "The savings we get from putting those calls on the network are already substantial."

It is widely accepted that sooner or later VoIP (also widely referred to as IPT, for Internet protocol telephony) will sweep the board, offering the promises of simpler management, lower costs and voice-application integration. The analysts predict it. The hardware and software vendors promote it. Even the telcos have begun to get in on the act. However, even the most enthusiastic advocate for the technology has to concede that at least for the moment, old-fashioned switched connection telephony is pretty good at its core mission: quality calls at high levels of reliability. VoIP features such as point-and-click dialing, integrated voice mail/e-mail management and CRM-to-caller-ID integration would be nice to have, no doubt?but none are yet mission-critical.