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The Hotel Commonwealth, a spanking new luxury hotel located on Boston's historic Commonwealth Avenue and affiliated with Boston University, is sold on SIP.

"We started with a totally blank slate," says Stewart Randall, principal consultant with Communications Design Associates, "but we knew we wanted the telephone infrastructure to be leading edge." Randall kept his options open: "We went with a structured wiring solution where we had Cat 5e running to all rooms and fiber between floors."

BU acts as the hotel's ISP and provides a full Class C link. "We ran 54 strands of dark fiber from the hotel to the university's core," Randall says.

For its in-house VoIP phone service, the hotel issued an RFP and weighed Avaya, Cisco, NEC and Nortel solutions before choosing Alcatel's Omni PCX, which gained native SIP functionality earlier this year. It was Alcatel's commitment to SIP and open standards that gave it the edge over Cisco.

"Our general recommendation to anyone is always to go with open standards," Randall says.

All 150 guest rooms and the lobby areas will contain decorator-approved cordless Pingtel Expressa SIP phones that offer guests many advanced features, including speed dialing and calendars, as well as the all-important wake-up call, which can be scheduled using the phone's LCD-screen menu. The Pingtel phones are connected to a Linux server and run Personal Java, allowing for easy third-party development of applications.

For a luxury hotel, being on the cutting edge carries some risk, but Timothy Kirwan, the hotel's managing director, says he believes the rich functionality provided by the IP phone system will pay off in guest satisfaction. "We're one of only two or three hotels in the country that have taken the plunge," Kirwan says. "It's a groundbreaking thing for our business."

Check out the Hotel Commonwealth at www.hotelcommonwealth.com, and listen to our interview with Stewart Randall and Timothy Kirwan at www.nwc.com/1416/1416p1.html.