slagburn

That's a great start... are you going to be networking a voicemail system with this as well? Do all of the sites have PRI capabililty?

Do you have enough space in the network shelves of the 61 to support 4 DDP cards? Is VoIP trunk a viable alternative?

Will the current numbering plan for each site support 5 digit dialing between them without conflictions?

m_steeler

Currently each site is set up on it's own. All sites with a 11C can support 2 PRI's or T1. I'll have to double check the 61C to make sure i can get 4 cards in there, but currently I have 2 so I just need two more. The numbering plan shouldn't be a problem. The DID range at each office is different so I don't "think" I should have a problem there. I didn't plan on using one VM system since each site has their own. VoIP is probably not a option since i would have to get to much approval and security testing to make that happen.

Each office has it's own T1 plus a few analog trunks. If I were to go with the set up I'm talking about, would I be disconnecting those T1's that are currently being used by each PBX and maybe just keeping a few trunks. I'm just not to familiar with this type of set up and I'm just wondering what I might be getting myself into. Thanks

Rachelle

Look closely at your dialing plan. You will need to have your LOCs the same in each site for proper routing between the switches. Also on the routes between sites you will want to look at the INAC setting. The use of DMIs is an issue if you are going to use NACD to push any ACD queue calls from site to site. There are a lot of programming for this routing that could come in to play.



rlc

slagburn

Don't forget that if you're going to use PRIs you'll need d-channels for each one, you can get those either through MSDL cards and cables or the d-channel daughter board for the DDPs. (expensive!!!) All of that real estate being consumed for T-1s (that will probably never be fully utilized) is why I'm a fan of properly implemented VoIP trunking for situations like this.

Take a look at NTP 553-3001-183 for some ideas on what type of dialing plan you want; if you can't find it PM you email addy.

m_steeler

I'm trying to figure something else out on how to do this. I wish VoIP was a option, but it's not at this point in time. I planned on just using T1's, not PRI's because where I'm at the PRI option is very expensive. After looking at our 61C, I just don't know if I can add 3 more cards to support the T1's. Thanks, I'll take a look at the NTP.

m_steeler

Would it be possible to just add maybe two trunks lines to each office that tie to the main site? Probably not do 5 digit dialing between all site's, but field all the calls that normally would go to the front desk at each office and just have the main office field those calls, then transfer over the trunks to the correct office?

My thought is to have a 1-800 number set up and the main number at each office would point to that 1-800 number, which would come in to the main site. They take the call and transfer it to the correct person at each site over the trunks. I think two trunks to each site would be enough to do this, just wondering if it can be done this way?? I know if I were to do 5 digit dialing between all sites I would need the T1's. Just trying to scale down this project a little. Thanks for your help.

slagburn

I suppose you could... not sure how you would order that type of wire service from your carrier though.

HCJes

Slag,
Are you doing your VoIP trunking across your own network/WAN links or are you doing it across the network. In either instance, how is the voice quality?

slagburn

We've used our own WAN links for our VoIP trunk projects, our back bone is ATM so there were some issues at that point, we're going over to a MPLS network pretty soon so things should get a little better for us on the QOS front.

Voice quality wise we never had any compliants on the 700 user site that we deployed VoIP trunking on, then again we never told them we changed anything so they didn't have any reason to complain. For bandwidth conservation I had it setup to only use the G.729AB codec which when compared with the G.711 or a voice grade TDM circuit is noticeably worse but good enough for voice... think of every call sounding like a cell phone call... people are used to that today with all of the cell phones out there so no biggy.

In my opinion the technology works and makes sense for a few applications, I don't promote switching out an entire TDM infastructure for VoIP but on the back end trunking side the point to multipoint aspect of VoIP trunking makes a lot more sense than the 100s of PTP T1 circuits we currently have.

The most important thing that I can think of to be successful with VoIP is to ensure that QOS managed correctly at each layer, all the bandwidth in the world although helpful will not help if the QOS it not setup right.