Any Real Advantages to Using SIP Phones? 2

[Stinney]

Management is insisting that we migrate our phones to SIP because we have migrated our head end to SIP with our carriers.

We don't see the need or any advantages to doing that at this time and don't see the need to convert our H.323 phones to SIP right away.

Some of the disadvantages that I see are:

1) Amount of work to convert all the phones and cost to replace phones that are not SIP capable.
2) Recommended limitation of 2,000 SIP registrations to Session Managers

a. Costs (initial and maintenance) to add more SMs for registrations​

b. Costs (initial and maintenance) to add more SMs for redundancy/resiliency​

3) Additional overhead of having to build SIP phones in SM in addition to CM

These are just quick thoughts without digging deeper into it.

What benefits or cons do you see moving all phones to SIP in your environment?

- Stinney

“The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life.” - Confucius

 

[avayaguy23]

Well H323 doesn't support remote worker unless you have configured the VPN functionality. SIP enables you to start using a variety of features such as Avaya SBC for your remote workers.

 

[kyle555]

Sharing a softphone and deskphone will work with H323, but not great.

Security is more manageable in a more common framework.

Allows SMGR profiles to be aligned with CM extensions - you certainly could do that on H323 but by no means have to.

Easier to setup Presence, and even if you use Teams for chat, it's nice to type in a name and see if they're on the phone.

If you want to get up to the point of using SSO for softphones, SIP is required. The deskphones can stay H323, but there's not much reason to stay H323 if you don't have to.

Yes, it's more work. I'd put it on your list of things to do.

 

[marcuspb]

One of the things I like about H323 is being able to tell if the device is actually in service via CM and also some third party monitoring app's (I.E. Prognosis) both CM and Prognosis can tell if the phone is built but not if it's actually in service. I have a schedule in CM that sends me an email every 15 minutes regarding alarms that may have occurred in that time frame. If a group of phones goes down I'll get an email, which is great for us because our remote branches have a G450 with an analog card for local 911 trunks and limited fail over abilities and that's all they have.
For me to find out if a SIP device is in service I have to get into SMGR and see if they are registered. (If there is a way to have the devices notify me vis email through SMGR I haven't figured it out yet.)
This may be me also but adding phones through SMGR is really slow and if you fat finger something you have to start completely over.
We had that push to SIP also once AACC and trunking went to SIP but there we're issues with one branch that we could not get to work properly with SIP soft phones.

 

[gwebster]

If you just want to use an IP phone and your users are used to the H.323 features, then stick with H.323. If you want to start using soft clients (Windows, iOS, Android) or Video/Collaboration, then you will want to move to SIP.

With SIP, you can have up to 10 hard/soft clients all logged in to the same extension all at the same time. Incoming calls ring on all of them. Active calls can be seamlessly handed off from one to the other. Take an example of starting a conference call on your J179 at home, handing that off to Workplace on your iPhone for the drive to work, and handing it off to your J189 when you get in to the office.

 

[kyle555]

Yeah, new stuff isn't as quick as a terminal.

And SIP and H323 are different. Go pull the plug on a SIP and H323 phone. The H323 has some keepalives every so often and CM will know it's OOS quick. SIP, if the phone gets called, you'll know then it isn't registered, otherwise you have to wait for the session to expire.

SIP is made to be extensible. So, the more you want to extend your system capabilities, the more you'll want/need to use it. It all depends on the environment you're managing.

All I'm saying is that, in your shoes, I wouldn't go out of my way to be an old stickler and say old is best because you'll make the system look old and unsexy. If those features impress the bigwigs, do it. Otherwise, if you're in a more controlled/standard environment where those features aren't needed and "sexy" comes from rock solid reliability and doing 1 thing well, then H323 is the right choice.

 

[Stinney]

gwebster, if you can have multiple endpoints logging into the phone at the same time, if I was to log into someone else's phone at the same time, is there anything that indicates that I have to the owner of the phone? I can't think of anything that would. Unless we have AD integration, they would know what the password for the phone is, as we can't put in a personalized password for every phone in the environment.

Or if the person answers an inbound call, or makes an outbound call on the extension, would the person who actually owns the extension know?

At least with an H323 phone it would log off the other person and cause people to look into why that is happening.


avayaguy23 I assume you're talking about hard phones and not softphone applications. We use one-x applications without any issue on our VPN.

- Stinney

“The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life.” - Confucius

 

[gwebster]

The ability to log in simultaneously is called Multiple Device Access. You can allow between 1 and 10 SIP devices to log in so you do not have to allow it if you do not want to.

One-X Communicator has been replaced by IX Workplace which is only SIP.

 

[NewNic]

and on another note, you will have the pleasure of learning how to perform sip traces

 

[Stinney]

NewNic, been doing SIP traces for many years now.

- Stinney

“The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life.” - Confucius

 

[BIS]

Don't forget call recording.

 

[Stinney]

BIS what about call recording?

- Stinney

“The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life.” - Confucius

 

[Wanebo]

It is a lot easier to fork SIP and RTP streams for analysis and/or recording by multiple systems than it is to do that with H.323. This allows for a more centralized control (usually at the SBC) if you have multiple CM's. It can also be cheaper due to lower licensing requirements.

 

[BIS]

Sorry, should have been more clear. Everything of course depends on your specific setup, but lets say you are using standard H.323. with shuffling disabled for SIP trunks (so all your audio is through media gateways, ports spanned to a recorder and a tsapi link for meta data). You then move to a full SIP environment - does your recording solution support that (siprec)?

 

[jimbojimbo]

I like the SIP endpoint capabilities on both the hard client and soft client. It took awhile however with 8.1.3 Avaya has achieved good parity with H.323 capabilities. If you are on 7.x you may want to look at holding off before migrating to all SIP. NOTE: Crisis Alert Notification to a SIP Endpoint requires 8.1.x.

Active Directory integration is the only way to go in my opinion for both the soft client and J1xx clients.

When correctly configured with split DNS the end user can move their hard phones from office to home without having to make changes to the configuration.

For both hard and soft clients I suggest issuing certificates for mutual authentication. This provides a second layer of protection when exposing the SBC on the internet for remote workers. The April update of Device Enrollment Services now allows you to upload a PKCS12 bundle for the endpoint for end user zero configuration of devices.

When used with AADS the end user can have a complex station password and does not need to know what it is. They log in via AADS with AD credentials and the phone extension and password is automatically provided to the end user.

With System Manager AD integration you can build your users in Active Directory. For Multi-Vendor systems (Avaya+Cisco+Microsoft) I do suggest Starfish. NOTE: Avaya Spaces users can be administered in AD and pushed by the AADS platform. Spaces also supports oauth/saml.

With the release of Avaya Workplace for Windows (formerly Equinox) you are now able to use the iOS, Android, or Windows client as an agent device so you can have one uniform client across the board. Of course you can still use the Avaya Agent for Desktop SIP client.