When faculty, staff and students arrived at Dartmouth College this fall, hey were greeted by a campus-wide voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP) telephone system, installed by Networked Information Systems (NIS) of Woburn, Mass. The 7,000-phone system--one of the largest deployed by a private, four-year college--will enable Dartmouth to reduce its telecommunications costs, while increasing the flexibility and productivity of faculty, staff and students.

Meanwhile, in Huntington, W.Va., the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has connected its district headquarters, 49 remote sites and floating repair fleet with a single distributed VoIP system that delivers advanced voice services and can be managed remotely from anywhere.

Such VoIP success stories are common today, but concerns about the security of Internet protocol telephony systems may slow adoption of the technology by small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) in the United States, according to research commissioned by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA).

About 300 U.S. businesses with 20-500 employees were polled, with just 48% saying they currently trust the security offered by IP telephony solutions available today. By comparison, 76% of respondents said they trust the security of traditional telephony systems.

The survey also found that delays and disruptions in voice and data communications occur at least monthly for 60% of the respondents, and 70% of those occurrences have a material impact on business.

Despite such misgivings, organizations like Dartmouth College and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are moving forward with VoIP deployments.

Dartmouth College administrators decided to undertake the project two years ago. "Our old TDM PBX was nearing the end of its useful life," says Robert Johnson, director of voice and data converged systems at the school. "We decided that voice traffic could be provided more strategically and cost-effectively by converging our voice and data networks."

Dartmouth already had a Cisco Systems data network in place, and that made the transition to a fully converged network relatively straight forward. Nearly 200 additional Cisco switches with power over Ethernet were installed on the campus to ensure voice availability during a power outage, with voice traffic given a priority over data. In addition, a 7,000-user voice mail system was installed, supported by five Microsoft Exchange Servers and a high-end Cisco Unity Server.

Johnson, who managed the VoIP deployment for Dartmouth, advises managers in similar situations to do their homework and choose an implementation partner with a strong track record and the highest certification levels in the technologies they will be integrating.

The Army Corps of Engineers district in Huntington selected a ShoreTel IP telephony system to replace a Centrex system that was costing $30,000 per month for the headquarters office alone. Robert Hall, coordinator of voice and data communications for the district, says, "The VoIP system is easy for us to install and administer, and we make changes on the fly all the time. The biggest installation problem is tracing the old lines, pulling the legacy systems, and doing the paperwork required to cancel the old ISDN lines."