Telco Optus is providing integration and carriage services for the project, which received funding early this year from the Victorian Office of Training and Tertiary Education.
A total of approximately 4,000 handsets will eventually be deployed.
A Cisco spokesperson told ZDNet Australia the VoIP technology had already been fully deployed and integrated at South West and Chisholm colleges.
"East Gippsland and Sunraysia are being scoped now as these two TAFEs were added to the project recently," they continued.
Five others -- Box Hill, Central Gippsland, Holmesglen, Kangan Batman, and William Angliss -- were currently in the integration phases and expected to be completed over the next few months to the end of October.
The project will build upon a previous deployment of Cisco networking hardware which was implemented several years ago at some of the colleges following a group review of network technology.
In a statement issued today by Cisco on the project, Optus Victoria director Rob Parcell said the carrier had been providing telecommunications services to TAFE colleges in the region for two years under the state government's Telecommunications Purchasing and Management Strategy (TPAMS).
According to Cisco the first phase of the TAFE project will involve the delivery of IP telephony and unified messaging services to staff. Future deployments are to support the use of virtual classrooms utilising videoconferencing, IPTV and other educational applications such as roll calls and emergency alerts.
The Cisco solution entails the following products:
- Unified IP Phone 7941G and 7961G handsets
- Catalyst 3750 and 6500 series switches
- Unified Contact Center Security Monitoring, Analysis and Response System (Security MARS)
- Unified Unity Connection integrated messaging
