France Telecom, its subsidiary Equant, and equipment vendor Cisco Systems will build what is being called the largest single deployment of voice over IP to date for airplane manufacturer Airbus at its campus in Toulouse, France.

Under a five-year contract, all Airbus sites in France and the U.K. will be migrated to VoIP, using Cisco IP handsets and Call Manager software and France Telecom as the primary service provider. The largest single site is the Toulouse campus, which will start with 30,000 lines and eventually grow to 35,000. The contract covers another 10,000 VoIP lines at Airbus sites in the U.K.

The Toulouse site will be larger than Cisco’s San Jose campus with its 26,500 lines, said Simon Kettle, solutions business development manager for Equant, which is providing global connections.

“There were some technical challenges to creating such a large site--we all had to feel comfortable with it before we got to the contract stage,” he said. “Airbus needed to be comfortable that that really could happen. So we did extremely exhaustive testing in a mockup upon the campus at Toulouse, and it was set up in San Jose in Cisco’s labs and stress-tested.”

The initial advantages to Airbus are primarily financial, Kettle said. The company focused on total cost of ownership of the system and its reliability and security. One prime benefit will be the immediate ability of Airbus workers to move around the 35,000-employee campus site and be able to log into any IP phone to immediately have access to personal features and capabilities.

“Mobility with in the campus is a major issue for Airbus,” he said. “They have a very collaborative business, and they have people moving from building to building on a very short-term basis. Under the old TDM system, those kinds of changes were slow and costly. Now, it’s just a matter of logging into an available phone.”

The next step for Airbus, once the system is fully operational, is to capitalize on the IP technology to make employee collaboration simpler and recognize productivity gains.

Increasingly, as VoIP becomes more mainstream, enterprise customers are focusing on the application benefits, Kettle said.

“This is a very strong step toward the maturity of the technology in the marketplace,” he said. “We find more of our business customers are now pushing us on specific vertical applications to explore how they can change their business processes, rather than just being focused on total cost of ownership.”

France Telecom and Equant will be responsible for day-to-day operations of the existing telephone system and will manage the transition to IP.