History

The existing Rice University Nortel telephone system was installed from 1999-2001 – Nortel was THE industry leader in it’s time.  However, in 2009 Nortel announced bankruptcy, and Avaya purchased the Nortel business telecom group.  Avaya announced Nortel’s end-of-sale in 2013, and end-of-support in 2018.  While our Nortel phone system has remained rock-solid, it is increasingly difficult and expensive to source replacement parts, and obtain maintenance/support.

A New Plan

On December 8, 2016, the Rice Board of Trustees approved replacement of our Nortel phone system with a Cisco VoIP system.  Voice-over-IP (VoIP) is the industry standard, and will continue to be for decades to come.  This new system offers many improvements:

• Utilizes the existing Rice data infrastructure for connectivity of endpoints to the VoIP system. A single cable to each desktop provides connectivity for both voice and data.
• Geographic redundancy (if one site experiences catastrophic system failure, the other site will automatically pick up the load)
• Unified messaging (voicemail in your email)
• Campus directory integration
• SIP trunking – Opportunities to save on long distance charges
• Future feature enhancements