Beevers joined the school after retiring as a dancer years ago and working as a production manager for professional ballet companies that traveled the globe.

"If you can manage to put 175 people in a ballet in Tokyo on short notice, you learn some things about taking care of IT systems," he said.

Most of the new IP-based technology is provided by NEC Unified Solutions Inc., a Canadian affiliate of NEC Corp.

The school and NEC entered a five-year agreement last year as part of a joint government and private initiative to develop technologically advanced facilities for training dancers, NEC officials and Beevers said. The technology will support the entire school, which has 270 staffers, 175 full-time ballet students from ages 11 to 20, and 650 part-time students ages 6 to 12, Beevers said. About one-fourth of the students are from abroad.

The voice-over-Wi-Fi phones are NEC's Dterm PSIII model, Beevers said.