Dow Blazes VOIP Trail

Computerworld - There's a good chance that The Dow Chemical Co.'s new IP converged network will be remembered as the industry milestone that finally got the IP telephony ball rolling. The $30 billion global company is building a 50,000-user integrated IP voice/data network.

In partnership with outsourcer Electronic Data Systems Corp. and network equipment giant Cisco Systems Inc., Midland, Mich.-based Dow has completed a pilot of its converged network, DowNet, at selected sites across four continents. Nearly all 450 Dow sites in 35 countries should be operational by the end of the second quarter, says Ray Warmbier, DowNet program manager.

Voice over IP (VOIP) is a hot topic of discussion, but large installations are scarce, particularly in the U.S. Yet Dow is making a wholesale, pioneering commitment to the technology. In fact, the size of DowNet is matched only by Cisco's own worldwide VOIP network.

"People will watch this rollout carefully," predicts Larry Hettick, an Alameda, Calif.-based independent telecommunications consultant who specializes in packet network convergence. "Dow's adoption of IP telephony provides serious evidence to other enterprises that VOIP might finally be ready for prime time."

Why take the plunge? It would seem tough to justify a global network overhaul during a recession. But most of Dow's existing circuit-switched private branch exchanges (PBX) were very old and were running different software versions, explains Warmbier. "Some were upgradable and some weren't. Getting our old PBXs upgraded, replaced and standardized on a global scale would have cost us a great deal of money," he says.

Rather than continuing to invest heavily in legacy technology, Dow turned to IP telephony. It's replacing circuit-switched PBXs with Cisco CallManager IP PBX server software, which runs on standard PC operating systems and hardware. Multiservice routers at Dow sites will shuttle both IP telephone calls and data packets across a common IP virtual private network (VPN) delivered by Equant, a global wide-area networking services provider based in Amsterdam.

The IP VPN service is built on Multiprotocol Label Switching technology, which brings quality of service and privacy to IP networks. The Equant IP VPN replaces a mix of frame relay, Asynchronous Transfer Mode and other wide-area network services at Dow. Plano, Texas-based EDS is installing and managing the entire project and is responsible for delivering on contracted telecommunications service levels.

Savings, Ease of Use

Warmbier says savings will come partially from bypassing the public switched telephone network in many non-U.S. sites where phone calls are expensive. In addition, he says, upgrading and changing standard IP- and PC-based systems is easier than relying on a PBX vendor to change its proprietary telephony software.