UMass Calls on Cedar Point for VoIP

AMHERST, Mass. -- Cedar Point Communications  has begun the first full-scale deployment of its voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) on a college campus at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

While university officials said the deployment will initially be aimed at 10,000 selected users beginning in the fall, the partnership includes a five-year research-and-development agreement with the school, which could see Cedar Point's Safari C3 multimedia switching platform system deployed across 50,000 users on the 1,450-acre campus.

The Derry, N.H., company has been operating pilot programs for its VoIP platform since last year at several universities across the country, including UMass, Texas A&M University, Plymouth State University in New Hampshire, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. The UMass deployment represents the first site to go beyond the pilot stage, though other projects are expected to move to full-scale deployments soon, according to Cedar Point co-founder George Kassas.