> A a 64K data stream would consume less than 1% of a slow Ethernet (10 > Mbps) LAN. So providing good VIOP in house would be no problem. The > capacity problem only happens on the WAN.
Not necessarily... any two modern computers copying a large file over a LAN can easily saturate a 10 or 100Mbps LAN (at least point to point). Bigger VOIP installations typically implement traffic prioritization (which is one of the reasons Cisco loves them), but I expect that if you were careful about your LAN layout in a small business it would be fine. > So I'm thinking that a system that uses IP in house with the option of > connecting to either the PSTN or an IP network would be the wisest thing > to shop for today. FWIW- When I was a small biz IT consultant I had 4 different clients in the last 3 years in the 10-30 employee range go through a diligent phone system selection process (which I was not involved with). All of them considered the typical VOIP systems offered to the small business market. One chose an Avaya VOIP system, the others all went with traditional NEC systems. There were two features that sold the one client on VOIP: the ability to inexpensively host their own conference calls (they were an NGO and had been paying a fortune for international conference calling) and the ability to place fully-functional extensions at remote locations that connected to the office system via Internet. None of the other organizations had a particular need for either of these features, and considered the VOIP systems to be more expensive and relatively untested. The NEC systems have been completely reliable. Getting back to T1, I didn't read the whole thread, but would suggest an alternative to T1 that is more reliable, faster, and far cheaper: a DSL and a cable connection together. This provides complete redundancy, with no shared infrastructure between the two carriers, and there are several SMB firewalls / routers that have two WAN ports and can do *outbound* load balancing for Internet traffic even on low-end connections with dynamically-assigned IP. My favorite is the Snapgear SG560, but Sonicwall also does this well (with appropriate upgrades). -Robert ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
