The city council of the city of Amsterdam is migrating to a complete open source Voice Over IP (VOIP) network solution based on Asterisk.
The Asterisk network will connect the central city administration and the fifteen city districts. Some 18,000 VOIP telephones will be installed, replacing the current phone. The city's IT department expects to integrate an extra 9000 mobile phones.
The city is basing the network purely on open source software, which makes it the largest such project in the world, says the project manager, Arno Jolink, VOIP expert at Israpunt, a Dutch IP telephone firm. According to him most other VOIP projects will use at least some proprietary applications. "We are only using open source, and that is why the project has attracted attention from all over the world. We just had someone from Dubai calling us about it, and I am supposed to do a presentation in the US in two weeks time."
Jolink says the Amsterdam public administration wants the entire project to use open source software. The company has developed its own VOIP management layer, made available as open source. Connections between the VOIP telephone systems and computer applications such as time registration and the link between the telephone system and radio-applications for harbour workers or the fire department, can be used by others, he explains. One example is the city of Heerlen, where the administration is using some of the connections developed for Amsterdam.
According to Jolink, the Amsterdam system is using both Digium and Sangoma VOIP hardware to make telephone exchanges (PBXs) "The city wants us to favour companies that actively support open source software."
The open source VOIP system allows the Amsterdam IT workers to put the new system into place without disrupting the existing infrastructure and without having to invest in expensive new hardware. "It allows us to do the migration gradually", writes Barth Prehn, one of the IT administrators in a post on the city's website.
A pilot project took place in February 2008 at the city's harbour deparment. The IT department began the VOIP migration in August of last year. The entire project is estimated to take about five years.
The city expects significant cost savings, not least because the single VOIP network will replace most of the current telephone exchanges in use in the city districts.