From the Things That Keep Me Awake At Night Department, one of the things I've been faced with since coming to Rio is the phone system. It's old. And disjointed. To make a call from one site to another, you have to dial the main number for the school, and get transferred. Just not an efficient system. And the quality of voicemail services varies with the school site. As does the chance that the phones will actually work - especially when it rains. That's the nature of 60 year old wires on old, analog systems. We lost our district office system a couple of years ago when the hard drive literally disintegrated. No kidding - it sounded like a gravel mixer. That's what happens when something built in 1984 (honest!) is asked to serve well into its twilight years - seems that nobody wants to spend money on making phone calls. Until they can't.
We submitted the necessary documents for eRate discounts on a district-wide, hosted VoIP system, and were funded for it. Total cost, after eRate discounts, would be about $1800 per month (we're an 80% district - do the math!). With the demise of eRate support for communications comes the need for us to reevaluate our original plan for utilizing hosted VoIP system to solve our problem, because we can't afford to do this without eRate.
Working off my virtual napkin: Our cost, once eRate is completely gone for communications, would be $18,000 per month. That's a serious pile of dinero just to make phone calls - and we're in a day and age when many people don't even have phones in their homes anymore, instead preferring to simply use their mobile phone as their home phone. (Makes sense, actually). So we started looking at alternatives. One alternative is to go back to the hosting company and find out what they plan on doing - end result, they're reeling from the decision about discounts for communications also. I'm not sure what they plan on doing, but I have to come up with a plan. So, let's say they cut their pricing in half. Our monthly commitment, $9,000 per month. Annual commitment, about $108K. Will they really cut their price in half? To be frank, drawing from my old MBA marketing classes, if these guys are really building their business model on a margin that's over 50%, they're either Apple or they're delusional. So I don't think even this scenario is going to float.
The problem for us is we simply cannot justify spending even $9000 a month for a hosted VoIP system when I can purchase a system for the district that would cost less than that and be done with it. When hosted VoIP was $1000 per month, it made sense. When it turned into $9K per month, no way. At that price, we have to ask ourselves if the marginal benefit of hosted VoIP justifies taking those funds away from our primary goal of providing every kid with a personal, mobile device. Especially when the overall goal of a phone system is just to make phone calls!
We looked at in-house VoIP solutions, we looked at analog systems (the upgrade what we have approach, even though nobody likes our existing phone system, even when it does work), and we looked at the open source solution. Cost-wise, the open source solution wins hands-down - solutions from Shoretel, Cisco, etc. are all still a huge pile of money just to make phone calls. (How much of that rich feature set that comes with VoIP do we really use, or need, anyway?) So what does it take to do this? Expertise. At the end of the day, the expertise for the open source solution works out to be no worse (in many ways better) than, say, Cisco. Or Shoretel. (We're computer guys, not phone guys!). On the other hand, there's 3 techs for 8 schools and the district offices (we're a school district, for crying out loud. What school district adequately staffs the Technology Department?), and our primary mission starts with kids and teachers and classrooms and works out from there. Phones are way down the list in terms of priority for service.
All of this goes totally counter to my The Cloud is the Future philosophy (hence, my sleepless nights). But when I can get an open-source solution (Asterisk) for less than one year of a hosted service, the issue becomes one of features, maintenance, installation, etc. Right now, that's where my head is - I don't have a firm answer yet. But that's where we are.
This is the thinking I'll take to cabinet, and with budget still being a seriously compelling and primary consideration, the main issue for me will be whether I can manage a system in-house. My guys are very, very good - we do have the technical expertise to do it. And to be honest, If I put the $108K towards hiring another support tech, there's a compelling argument that says it won't take a full time employee to manage a phone system.
I doubt this is too far from what everyone in education is thinking right now - it's definitely a topic of conversation. It's just a matter of where it makes most sense to allocate the limited resources we have available - student devices, or phones?
