School was about to open and the mandate was to get everything working before classes resumed.
In a previous post: Campus Communications: Access and Control I discussed the challenges of one of our campus customers. A short time later their unprotected telephone system took a nosedive along with their phone vendor. I'm happy to report that we snagged the deal but you can be sure that the administrators were reacting and the planning and skin in the game I previously discussed was ours because the customer made little time available for discussions. School was about to open and the mandate was to get everything working before classes resumed.
The internal copper wiring dates to the 1940s and was a deciding factor to not use any DPT (digital proprietary telephones) and to go all IP. The old supporting wiring is poorly laid out in the worst conditions. The data LAN is flat and we felt confident of the new infrastructure having installed it a few years prior. We assembled the system, licensed and updated the software on a Saturday and started installation.
Housekeeping is always important to me and that is making the install look good, neat, orderly and clean. Our customer ordered an APC Netshelter to house the new gear. We used the customer electrician to run signal wires for door phones and door latches--home-running them to the computer room. I used a wheel to estimate the length of runs and determined that we could easily stay within the confines of 590 feet.
The signal wire is 18AWG with a decent shield and outer jacket. Cat5E drops were installed and home-run back to an ADTRAN 1534 WiFi switch with onboard PoE. This stack of switches is located in a classroom loft that is centrally located to minimize the length of drops for all the existing access points (ADTRAN AP150) that we previously installed with Cat6. All four switch locations on campus have both TVSS and dual conversion UPS. The former unprotected telephone system was located in another building interconnected using underground cabling.
We installed Panasonic BB-HCM735A outdoor network cameras above exterior access doors and used available PoE from the ADTRAN 1534 to power them. The camera mounts provide a channel to feed the cable through to the camera housing. The sun shields for the cameras should be used. Spend the time setting the camera presets and other settings. Consistency is important and spending 2-3 hours per camera is worth the time.
Near each door we also installed an outdoor door phone. The Panasonic Communications Assistant Pro client software was installed on the required staff PCs. Each door phone listed in the directory was programmed with a URL of the corresponding camera to auto pop screens displaying the visual of the door. Each door phone extension (Caller-ID) is matched to a camera URL that provides live video coverage for that door. Panasonic’s clever use of Caller-ID and their UC client Communications Assistant Pro won this customer over. We suggested to the staff to add name placards over each door phone—one, so the visitor knows their location and secondly, so the staff is without doubt and so the camera records it too (future evidence).
The immediate challenge was to add VLANs and routing. The customer Sonicwall firewall was setup by the customer's IT contractor to accommodate this. In all the ADTRAN switches we also added VLAN2 for voice. We decided to place the cameras and telephone system assets together in VLAN 2. We spent significant time on this, testing and then debating details and testing over and over. I've discussed MACs before in the IPT world and this proved to be no exception for real world vs ideal world. The school wants simple-to-move, patch and change, but the real world is they don't have all PoE switches nor do they have enough assets to connect every wall port in the campus.
We know for when we do IP paging that we have allowed for a third VLAN or we will use spare fiber pairs and build zone controllers, Ethernet speakers and scheduled bells and announcements off of that. Thankfully the old paging system of select, push, hold down and then talk is still working.
Because we only did a replacement of existing phone and line counts, not future wares for the classrooms--we used self-labeling phones with 48 virtual buttons in the faculty room. We created 25 phantom mailboxes for teachers and mapped message waiting indicators to those virtual buttons. Now the school office staff can transfer callers directly to the teachers' voice mailboxes or callers just dial directly through the automated attendant. The teachers also have the option to just get their voice messages delivered to their school email accounts.
The door sensors proved time consuming. The locksmith concealed the signal wiring installed previously into the doorframes and added the electric strikes. The school electrician connected a bank of relays and 24VDC power supplies to interface with the Panasonic door opener card. We spent 1-2 hours per door, to test and verify the amount of time the system (IP-PBX) keeps power turned on to release the lock, and that the doors opened and closed securely every time. We ended up using 6 seconds of closure (release the lock) to allow more time for the younger kids and older adults. Just to note: sometimes techs forget to turn off call coverage of door phones, other times customers want door phone calls routed off site after so many rings or to go to voice mail. All signal cables for the door openers and door phones home-run back to IP-PBX. The power supply for the relay bank is protected.
Officially this project is over at the evening of this writing. School starts the next day. We've eliminated one awful phone vendor (because they didn’t power protect the circuits and AC power or provide UPS for the customer). The school infrastructure is solid with a fiber backbone network, managed switches with WiFi and now an IP telephony solution with network cameras. Our next project is to eliminate the old paging system and we have started planning for this and will be putting a solution together for next year. The customer managed to wrangle Verizon into installing FIOS and now they have Comcast and FIOS. Both will remain and replacement of POTS and Centrex services will be a project for another day.
