On Fri, 2006-07-28 at 00:55 -0400, Jim Van Meggelen wrote: > each environment has to be evaluated on its own. > In some cases re-using the voice wiring makes sense, in others it will not.
No disagreement here, there are always special cases and each situation has to be evaluated on its own merit. For the purposes of this discussion I was assuming what I feel is a fairly typical situation; workstations with both an existing cat5 drop and a cat3 drop where the cat5 network is a bit of a mess of routers, switches and hubs. Given the above and ignoring special cases and politics; what are the relative merits of using the cat3 network vs. upgrading the cat5/LAN network? I was interested in hashing through this discussion because its probably a situation that many of us encounter frequently. Personally, I feel the convergence aspects of VoIP are one of its main selling features. Proprietary private phone systems with their own networks is exactly what VoIP/Asterisk purports to avoid. So the concept that setting up a parallel network just for phones would be better and less expensive goes against what I would expect. That's why I wanted to hear from the CAT3 side of the argument to make sure I wasn't missing anything. So far, while I understand there are always special cases, I haven't heard anything that leads me to believe that setting up a parallel network based on existing CAT3 cabling would be less expensive. Regards, John
