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"Tom Miller" <[email protected]> 05/02/2011 08:39 AM Please respond to "NT System Admin Issues" <[email protected]> To "NT System Admin Issues" <[email protected]> Press this button if the "To" is a fax number. Enter in the fax number like 123-456-7890. cc Subject VOIP design questions Folks, We are planning to retire our current phone system and move to a Mitel VOIP system. Not having implemented VOIP before, I have some questions for those of you that have: - our vendor claims our current data network can easily handle VOIP traffic since it's a small amount of traffic (don't know exact amount yet, still awaiting vendor response). As such, they tell it is possible to use our current network to accommodate voice and data. I'm not sure if I"m comfortable with this. I was thinking of a more segregated approach: different network and voice and data never intersect. I believe only 10 Mbps is necessary to support VoIP. Just be sure all voice traffic (including all servers, controllers, etc) are on a separate sub-net from your data network QoS may suffer otherwise. - our vendor claims we can use the existing data jack for the phones, and plug the desktop PCs/laptops into the phone as a sort of switch. I'm thinking this would add another level of complexity: phone is broke and by the way you can't get on the network now. True! It has been rare, but it is somewhat traumaic for the user. The fix so far has been to do a cold boot of the phone (unplug the phone from the network and power if PoE is not used), count to "10", plug it back in, and watch. Those failures have not been "subtle" as the phone usually has a number of LEDs glowing on our Polycom phones. Here is another issue. (It is very annoying for our DBA's, but they're not interested in paying to fix this.) The models of Polycom phones we use have a 10/100 switch. So, even though it is plugged into a Gbps jack on the network switch, the switch in the phone will throttle it back to a 100 Mbps connection. Our DBA's are very annoyed by this (but not yet annoyed to the point of wanting to pay 2-3 times as much for a phone with a Gbps switch in it). - the reason the vendor suggests the above is that the current voice drops (cat5) terminate to phone patch panels (in most cases). Those cables would need to be cut and re-terminated to switches. Tell us about those "phone patch panels"... Does this mean your current voice drops (at the desks) are RJ-45 (not RJ-11)? Do these "phone patch panels" also consist of RJ-45 jacks (rather than to a punch-down block)? Finally, are the "phone patch panels", if they have RJ-45 jacks, close enough to reach your network switch? If this is the case, (RJ-45 to RJ-45, and the patch panel can reach the network switch), then your only limitation is availability of switch ports. You will still need to sub-net into separate voice and data sub-nets, but the phones and the PCs can have separate connections to the switch. This would get around the throttling of Gbps connections to 100 Mbps described above. -- richard ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
