On Fri, 2006-07-28 at 12:32 -0400, Jim Van Meggelen wrote: > It puts all the sets on their very own LAN, which means there is zero chance > of them having to contend with any other LAN traffic. Since there is nothing > fancy going on with either LAN, there is no need to put in expensive mansged > switching equipment, followed by expensive labour to design, deploy, test > and support this new LAN.
This is probably whats changing the most. Today any reasonable switch will have VLAN capabilities or layer 3 QOS and its really not complex to configure. Granted its more complex than doing nothing but its still not that hard. And spending a little more on a switch will protect the entire LAN (not just the VoIP) from some virus infected device. In my books its well worth the investment. > "Keep you old switches and network spagetti, we don't need to (nor want to) > touch it, and the hardware for the voice LAN will be about $5 per set". I figure upgrading the LAN would be about the same. After all need the same number of LAN ports on the parallel network as you need on the existing LAN so the switch cost would be the same. > One of the things you said that > struck me was ". . . ignoring special cases and politics . . .", which I > found ironic because those two reasons are significant factors in why it can > be so much trouble dealing with an existing LAN. I would argue that all > cases tend to be special, and politics nearly always plays a part. I agree. I said ignore it because when you are going into a situation you want to advocate the best technical solution and let the special cases and politics beat you down from there. You run into all kinds of politics. As an example, in many federal government offices the computers and network are under the IT department budget but the phone system is under the office administration budget. That killed any further discussion of VoIP because the admin people simply said "this is our budget and we aren't giving it up". Not to mention the tech's weren't at all thrilled with having yet another task assigned to them to manage. Sure they could save tens of thousands but neither side is motivated to fight for VoIP so they just "upgrade" with yet another proprietary Nortel at 3 times the cost. John
