Metaswitch eNews - August 2007
New Opportunities For Success In The Education Market
E-rate And Funding For Hosted VoIP Services
By Chris Carabello, Marketing Director, Metaswitch
The Education market holds tremendous promise for service providers.
According to a recent study from Instat*, telecommunications
revenues from the K-12 U.S. education market stood at nearly $4.8 billion in 2006 and
is estimated to reach nearly $6 billion by 2010. On an individual customer level, this
translates to approximately $40,000 per customer annually.
Education managers are expected to increasingly demand more
bandwidth and adopt services such as IP VPN, Ethernet technologies, and VoIP,
in an effort to improve student achievement, improve teachers' productivity, and for
allowing additional services to be provided over a greater area, such as
in distance learning applications.
In addition, as school districts consolidate their networks,
hosted IP telephony services are expected to experience tremendous gains in
the K-12 segment. Based on recent changes to the E-Rate
program, these services are now eligible to be discounted for your school and
library
customers.
Background - E-rate And VoIP
The Schools and Libraries Program of the Universal Service Fund,
commonly known as "E-Rate," is administered by the Universal Service
Administrative Company (USAC) under the direction of the Federal Communications
Commission (FCC), and provides discounts to assist most schools and libraries in the
United States to obtain affordable telecommunications and Internet access.
The most significant recent change affecting eligible services
for the 2007/2008 funding year is the FCC's decision to make VoIP (Voice over
Internet Protocol) services eligible for E-rate discounts. IP PBX type equipment
has
long been eligible under Internal Connections, but VoIP services such as Hosted
IP
PBX have not been eligible.
Until last year, some VoIP providers were competing with
traditional telephone service providers, but were not contributing to the Universal
Service Fund. Last summer, however, the FCC began requiring VoIP providers to
contribute to the Fund and this contribution requirement provided the major impetus
for making VoIP services eligible for E-Rate discounts.
The Opportunity For VoIP To Schools And Libraries
With Metaswitch, you have unique abilities to market and
win in the education market with a complete suite of IP solutions including
Hosted IP
Telephony. Schools and libraries often have dynamic requirements and require
the flexibility to expand quickly without having to constantly upgrade or replace
premise-based hardware. Traditional TDM Centrex service, long the staple of
a
school's voice network, does not provide the flexibility of a VoIP system nor
can it easily deliver personalized call routing, which busy mobile teachers
find
extremely valuable.
Further, with increasing concerns over the security and safety
of students, schools now wish to supply emergency phones in every class with
hotlines to local emergency agencies. With VoIP, these emergency phones can be
readily connected to the school's LAN network where drops in every class room
have become increasingly commonplace.
SIP Handset manufacturers as well have begun designing solutions
for this market. For example, XML based applications can be programmed into the phones
to better enable mass communication to parents of school delays or cancellations - a
big time saver over the outdated, manual call tree system employed today.
Now Is The Time To Act
The application process for the 2008/2009 E-Rate funding
year began this July, with late January as the historical deadline for schools
and libraries to complete all paperwork and identify their service provider.
Now is therefore the right time to act by
- applying for E-Rate (if you have not already done so)
- establishing your Product Portfolio for this market
- identifying education opportunities in your region
- preparing your customer facing organizations
- marketing through a "Roadshow" or Technology Briefing at your site
to demonstrate relevant capabilities.
The education vertical welcomes advances in technology and,
with the support of Metaswitch and their service providers, they will be able
to adopt and integrate these technologies into their network to enhance delivery
of their overall educational experience.
* Instat, October, 2006
Back to the August 2007 newsletter