Cali Schools Learn a Lesson In 3Com

Cisco may be the VoIP market leader, but that hasn't swayed Bob Inpyn any. The president and CEO of Team One Networking, a $3 million VAR based in Roseville, Calif., sells only 3Com products to customers that seek IP telephony solutions.

And so it goes that two school districts in California--Roseville City Schools and Rocklin Unified--will be using pure-3Com VoIP systems in about three years' time.

Roseville and Rocklin received bond money to remodel some of their existing facilities and build new ones, says Inpyn, adding that Team One will work on six to seven of those schools each year.

"We started with Roseville--an area that's growing by leaps and bounds," Inpyn says. "Their old systems were failing, and the district had only eight to 10 analog lines to each school. That wasn't enough, so we installed an NBX system from 3Com. Now they have 46 lines."

Inpyn says he touts 3Com VoIP solutions for several reasons--not least among them, ease of use and reliability.

"We were able to install one of the systems over a weekend," Inpyn says. "And we can be confident these solutions will stay up and running. From 1998, when we got into the business, until now, I've never had an NBX system go down because of a virus."

The Team One chief attributes the reliability of 3Com's VoIP systems to Unix, the OS on which they run. "Cisco's and Nortel's systems use Windows, which has so many umbrellas on top to make it look simple," Inpyn says. "But it's complicated underneath, and it's vulnerable to viruses. Unix is a more perfected and hardened OS than Windows."

What's more, it takes a lot less time for users to master 3Com phones than it would for them to learn the intricacies of a Cisco key system, Inpyn says. "These phones look and act like phones," he says. "Some vendors focus on making them sexy, not functional. The learning time on an NBX is five minutes. Try that on a Cisco phone, with all of its features and soft switches."

As for pricing, 3Com's IP systems offer customers a good value for their money, Inpyn says. "All in all, I think Cisco product is overpriced and underperforming."