About 10 people are using Asterisk now, but UQ will soon begin a pilot project with one of its residential colleges to supply VOIP to students' rooms. This will involve some 200 users.

With the call quality with Asterisk "good", UQ's strategic technologies group manager Dr Rodney McDuff discovered one bug in the software and, with the aid of the Asterisk development team, wrote patches to fix it.

Sinclair is also interested in the application integration possibilities IP telephony brings, like accessing voicemail as an mp3 file through the myUQ student portal.

While Asterisk is open source and free, Sinclair said more testing and design considerations still need to be worked through before it is deployed in production.

"QoS will be an issue, and you have to have UPSes and redundant networks," he said. "When you have 60 to 80 buildings on campus every switchboard will make use of it."