Houghton College Selects Pingtel's Open Source VoIP Solution

Houghton College Is Replacing Its Nortel System with Pingtel’s open source Enterprise Communications System, a 100-percent SIP-based VoIP Solution

WOBURN, MA – January 8, 2007 — Pingtel Corp., the leading provider of SIP-based Enterprise Communications Systems (ECS) today announced that Houghton College has selected Pingtel’s SIPxchange™ ECS for campus-wide deployment. When completed, the system will provide 1,500 faculty, staff, and students with real-time open source VoIP communications services.

Don Haingray, Director of Technology Services at Houghton College said, “I love the approach that Pingtel has taken with the product. Unlike many other VoIP vendors, they developed their product completely around the IETF SIP standard. Their approach allows the end user to choose the phones and gateways that work best for them, as opposed to being locked-in to one brand. Also, Pingtel did not compromise on ease of use. While most SIP PBXs require the manual configuration of each phone, with Pingtel's solution it is all automatic: The 'plug and play' management allows phones to discover and retrieve settings from the server and all configuration data is centrally backed up.”

While many first generation open source VoIP systems are still architected like TDM systems with “channels” feeding into a centralized and proprietary system, Pingtel’s SIPxchange ECS is built around a superior architecture that better facilitates direct communications and progressive load balancing. The immediate benefits include higher voice quality, improved scalability, and optional system redundancy. Pingtel’s ECS offers a rich and robust set of features—including redundant configuration for high availability, great scalability, and full call controls—that fulfill even demanding needs and streamline the installation and administration of voice and other IP communications applications.

Don Haingray of Houghton College continues: “We were stuck with an aging Nortel system that we had to replace. While we looked at other open source solutions such as Asterisk, we selected SIPxchange as the better solution overall.”

“We’re excited that Houghton College has selected Pingtel’s SIPxchange to advance its communications platform,” said William J. Rich, President and CEO of Pingtel. “Due to SIPxchange’s low cost of deployment and operation, especially in an educational setting that has many users relying on the communications system, Houghton College will benefit from upgraded infrastructure and cost savings while providing its faculty, staff, and students with first-class voice communications.”

SIPxchange ECS is available in various configurations, suiting the needs of both small and large deployments. The solution was developed with the end user in mind and provides full IT integration, load balancing, an easy-to-use web-based interface for configuration, and full software and hardware support to ensure clear, direct voice connections. SIPxchange runs on standard Intel / AMD servers and does not require any additional specialized hardware.

On a promotional basis, Pingtel offers special pricing to educational facilities in an effort to promote state-of-the-art communications infrastructure in places where it matters most: our schools.