Tag Archives: introduction

Voice-over-IP at Penn State: Foreword

At the next Bloggers Anonymous meeting: My name is Bill and I started a technology blog. (Everyone nods and says “mmm” to indicate understanding.)

Working in operations, Telecommunications and Networking Services, I spend much of my day in the nuts and bolts of our VoIP phone system. I would be called a “data guy” rather than a “voice guy” as my role and prior experience are in computer systems administration — Windows, Unix and unix-like operating systems, and networking. Of course, the line drawn between voice and data is now almost non-existent. Voice-over-IP, over a decade old but ever-evolving, is still a hot technology, and Penn State is really at the front of the pack as an educational institution with such a large-scale (about 11,000 VoIP telephones at this time) deployment.

I’ll be writing in this blog about the technology involved in PSU’s VoIP telephone system (primarily Cisco), stuff I’ve written to enhance the user experience, tools I’ve found useful, my home VoIP setup (Asterisk), and other related topics.