Advice for several hundred wireless workstations 2

[chippowell9]

Hi all, may I present you a challenge?

Imagine you have a CM or CS1K with deskphones and someone came to you and said "Hey, we're going to convert 500 traditional workstations (wired for voice/data) to brand new wireless workstations!" Like seriously, no wires to these new workstations except power. PC's, laptops, and printers for workers will all connect over kickass enterprise wifi. How would you handle it from a telephony standpoint?

Oh, and there's a call center with AACC 6.4, and also PRI trunks to PSTN.

Assume the capital is there to upgrade or add components to CS1K or CM to whatever was necessary to achieve this.

Assume we're looking for a very forward-looking solution, not stringing bubblegum and spit together to make old phones work.

My initial thoughts: One-X Communicator, One-X Agent, headsets, maybe USB SIP phonesets to the PC? Any other thoughts? Pros and cons?

 

[kyle555]

Typically wifi phones need QoS or support of things like WMM.

Figure even Plantronics will send a guy to do a huge site survey to make sure 500 wireless headsets don't interfere and screw up with one another.

As long as you're not actually expecting as reliable a solution at a layer 1 level than using actual wires, you should be fine.

You're just trading the network management at a wired level to a wireless one. That, and the phones are their own little tiny computers that don't crash like Windows or poorly written enterprise apps do.

Phase 1 - try doing everything you said on softclients, but still hard wired, test it to death.
Phase 2 - see if wifi can do it. I'm not a wifi guy, but you'll have a much bigger job managing that real time communication without wires. If that benefit is worth it to you, go for it.

If you want, go for the trifecta and use Cisco wifi phones for the speech path

 

[jeffjacobs]

Just adding my few cents here.

Over the last 5 years we have converted our entire corporate phone system. We had the traditional Definity refrigerator cabinets in our corporate office with 12 different type of AT&T / Lucent / Avaya telephone sets (74XX, 64XX, 84XX). Our remote offices had Partner, Merlin, and IP offices, and every version of these systems that were ever made. Today we have CM 6.3 running in our corporate office and gateways at some of our remote offices. Most remote offices are just using telephone sets on our corporate network tied back to our corporate CM. 95% or our 5,000 end points are 9650s.

Now our management comes to us and wants to know how they get the telephone sets off the desk. As far as I can tell they think there will be some big savings by getting rid of desk phones. I just don't see it.

chippowell9 as for your situation, we are using Avaya One-X Agent and One-X Communicator very successfully for employees working from home. We are starting to deploy the Avaya One-X Mobile app on smart phones as well. We have not gotten rid of our desk phones yet.

 

[kyle555]

I can't dispute the cost savings of not managing ethernet ports to desks anymore, let alone POE ones. I just think the feat of wireless engineering required to do it well and in a controllable manner is overly ambitious and dangerous. No matter how kickass your wifi is, you're one shitdisturber or defective component away from your call center going down.

Funny story: national regulator chased down one of my buddies through management because the tracking GPS the company put on his car was defective and knocking out data on whatever cell tower it was connecting to. Every morning driving into the office, the tower in his town came back up, and the next tower in towards the office would go down.

Come up with a sane wireless DDOS attack plan - if that's even possible.

 

[chippowell9]

I don't see the cost savings either, but that's neither here nor there. I'm a telecom guy, not a network or wifi guy. We have great network, wifi, and information security teams, so I'll be working with them on that side of it all.

Really, I'm wondering if anyone else has done something like this. I know plenty have gone all softclient or all USB-to-PC for phones, but I'm wondering if anyone has done all that solely on wifi and on a single campus.

 

[kyle555]

Hey, someone's gotta do it first. I've just always associated wifi with mobility and not working in a fixed space.

To your original question of how to approach it from a telephony standpoint - I would approach it with skepticism and lots and lots of monitoring. I would want jitter and packet loss reports all the time and I would basically never want to deal with a speech quality issue again.

Some problems I've seen are things like recording 2 screens off a desktop where 1 of those screens is with some USB to DVI video card.

Are these laptops or desktops?

Are the machines there, online and on the network to get patches outside working hours, or will the domain controller eventually force them on me while I'm working cause I'm only on the network while I'm working?

Are they laptops people are going to treat like their own PCs no matter what you do? Is charging my iPhone when I plug it in going to maybe screw with the USB controller?

Are people watching the Olympics/other sporting event like crazy going to change things?

Are you recording screens and audio?

How bad are the enterprise apps people have to use to service the calls?

I think it would be very interesting, and perhaps the way of the future to do things this way. I think it would be even more awesome if all of the caveats I can think of are accounted for and mitigated in your environment.

I spoke to some people once who were dying for an iOS/Android call center app. Basically having a mobile workforce of road techs that they wanted available in an ACD and they were doing all sorts of things to IP Agent through RDP to try and achieve that.

My opinion is that you're too ahead of the game for infrastructure and enterprise products to treat your use case as seriously as you'd like and that you would be taking on much added responsibility as an organization to roll out that solution.

The one thing you haven't mentioned in your questions is "why" you need/want to do this.

 

[chippowell9]

Thank you kyle555, I very much appreciate your input. I can't justify my organization's reasons for wanting to go all wireless in a fixed campus environment. Suffice to say that I would not personally recommend this approach, but the decision isn't mine. Getting enterprise phone service and call center working without wires will be my challenge.

As for the users: Desktop PC's and laptops both...probably mostly desktops, network printers, applications, some video, desktop collaboration, not much in the way of recording. And when I say wireless, there will be electrical of course.

Great feedback, thanks again. If you or anyone hear about an enterprise doing something like this, I'd love to hear about it. Any other questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome.