Cisco hooks up with British Airways

Cisco Systems will help British Airways deploy VoIP throughout its giant Terminal 4 in London's Heathrow Airport.

The undertaking involves 14,000 British Airways staff, and around 8,500 Cisco phones.

When the system is in place in less than a year from now, calls handled by these phones will be facilitated by Cisco CallManager call-processing software and will be routed over a Cisco Ethernet network. Cisco MeetingPlace conferencing will also be part of this solution.

No specific price tag, but you can bet it's in the many millions of pounds. Cisco says the deployment's return-on-investment should happen in about two years after everything is in place.