Complexity of Cisco IP Telephony

[jneiberger]

This might seem like a really oddball question, and it's addressed to those of you with experience with Cisco IP Telephony as well as other phone systems.

How would you compare the complexity of the Cisco system to the other systems?

How would you rate the learning curve? Is "The Cisco Way" fairly simple, ridiculously complex, or somewhere in between?

I'm only lightly familiar with IP telephony and voice communications in general, but from my point of view Cisco seems to be a bit more complex than the others. Is that a correct impression or not?

I realize this is very subjective and there is no single answer. I'm just curious about the opinions of actual users of the systems.

Thanks!
John

 

[CM007]

Hi John,
I have a fair background on cisco LAN and WAN solutions. However during the last 3 months I have taken the Cisco IP Telephony trainning courses and I now have the credit of installing a complete IPT solution on CM for an enterprise customer. Seems a bit complex to start off but gradually u get familiar with the system.
I did not have any voice background prior to installing the system.
The networking professional url on the cisco site and this site were all the answers to my problems during the installation of the IPT.
Its a very interesting field. I bet
Cheers
Renzil

 

[youcandoit]

I moved from structured cabling, desktop support, networking and definity g3si maintenance and support. once you have a general feel of the features of a pbx and how to deal with the carriers, moving to VoIP seemed logical. The interface is a web based gui, what more could you ask for. in the old days pbx programming was done from a terminal with a green screen on command lines in the data center/mdf. the programming interface that i dont like is the Nortel option 11 with all the different loads. now nortel i would stay away from.

 

[jneiberger]

We're already a Nortel shop. I'm not in the voice side of our group but I've seen the Nortel CLI many times and I think it's one of the most awful, confusing monstrosities ever unleashed upon mankind.

Seriously, we're in the process of looking at a few different vendors for IP telephony solutions and I'm trying to get a feel for the technologies by listening to people who actually use the stuff. However, I'm particularly interested in hearing from people who already have a lot of experience with other non-IP PBX equipment like Nortel, Avaya, or Lucent.

Thanks!
John

 

[youcandoit]

i support Cisco Call manager cluster and Definity Prologix/g3si/g3r.

TDM technologies are proven and will rarely fail if ever.

if you're going IP particularly Call Manager make sure the win 2000 servers are robust enough (and kept up to date)to support the amount of devices you plan on configuring.

If you dont have a need for more than 200 user you can go with CME call manager express. it runs on an Integrated services router that also provides your ethernet, pstn trunking, slot for unity(voicemail) etc....

What i would suggest is an Avaya solution. depending on user requirements an s8300 or s8700 would do nicely and would integrate IP and TDM technologies. Cisco cant do that.

This has been my two cents.

 

[jneiberger]

We have a couple of thousand users spread out over 110 locations. We also have a requirement that new locations would be VoIP to the desktop while older sites would initially keep their Nortel PBX which we would front-end with some sort of box via QSIG that would connect the PBX to the IP network.

Interestingly, we've received responses to our RFI from Cisco, Mitel, and Nortel but the Avaya VAR chose not to respond.

 

[TheCardMan]

I mainly supported Definity PBX's for the past 17 years, I now have deployed 4 Cisco IPT sites ranging from 18 users to 350 users each. During the decision process I was hesitant in going "Total IP", I was leaning towards a Hybrid Solution. As time went on we decided to take the plunge and go total IP and chose Cisco CCM/Unity. Do I like the system? Yes, it is pretty neat. Installation process was not terrible once you got used to the Batch process. My biggest issue with the system is the administration. You have to modify SO MANY different places to do a simple name change. Ad to move line appearence sequences on a phone is a long process. Everything you seem to do you have to reset the phones which in the users eyes looks like the phone is acting up. Seems to me basic administration is far more in relation to the number of steps needed to get a simple change done. Example, Change the name on a user in a Definity PBX, one command, one line and enter and your done. In Cisco world, you have to change the name in 6 places (in our config) and thats not counting Voice Mail assignment.

 

[CallMangler]

I worked for Nortel for 5 years and am very conversant with Meridian programming. I agree, the CLI is a nightmare but once you know it your value on the job market certainly goes up a few Ks! It probably took me a year to become an expert at it though.

I now work for a company who, like you are a traditional Nortel house with over 50 Meridians and an TDM private network. We recently went through a massive decision making process between Cisco and Nortel for new sites and Cisco came out as the winners. Mainly due to their superior networking architecture. However, we are finding that Cisco's Voice Features are still not very well developed. Nortels telephony features are far better and are based on years of development. The downside is the complexity of their CSE solution with lots of boxes and ELANs and TLANs and limitations in the networking arena. There are advantages and disadvantages with both. I guess it all depends on what your most important requirements are.

Hope that helps?

 

[lanman469]

I am just learning the AVVID solutions. I have mostly a data background with somme nortel, toshiba and Norstar experiance. Once I took a class on CM I found it is not very hard. The user interface is web based No Command Line, Probably the hardest part of the AVVID system is how the calling search spaces and partitions work together. Once yoy have an understanding of that the system is fairly easy to get a grasp of.

 

[bclarke68]

I have only done voip installs, no tdm.

Customers ranging from 10 users to 1500.

3Com and Cisco AVVID.

Cisco's interface is overly complex and time consuming to do Moves, Adds, and Changes, compared to 3com's and I would assume Avay's.

Cisco CallManger is also missing a few important features, Do Not Disturb, and Paging via the phone speakers.

I am not a real big fan of having to write / buy services based applications on seperate servers for everything.

Then there is all the patch management to keep Windows up to date and safe.

It does creat a lot of service revenue for our company however

 

[jneiberger]

Other than the features already mentioned (Do Not Disturb and Paging), what other features are missing from Call Manager? We're trying to be thorough in our research but I don't want to get part way through a rollout only to discover that we're missing a feature that we need.

 

[jerake75]

Do Not Disturb is available if you implement IPMA. I also equate Do Not Disturb with just forwarding all your calls to voicemail, which takes all of a few keypresses on a non-IPMA setup.

If by paging you mean intercom, there is a limited free service that comes with the SDK (one-way intercom) that can be implemented. You can also adapt the Hoot N' Holler feature to a multicast intercom.

TMH

 

[telefreak]

A reply to the comment posted by youcandoit regarding Nortel CLI. True, true - what a pain in the butt. Remember though - that old CLI is only used by technicians these days that are very familiar with it. The programming interface on the Nortel TDM systems as well as the current IP systems is browser based and is very robust.

The X11 software has been migrated to a fully IP ready solution that is, in Gartner Group's opinion, the creme de la creme (magic quadrant).

 

[jthong555]

I am new to voip
Trying to get certify with cisco for voip.
how many exams is that and what are the exams numbers.
thanks

 

[megaco]

IPT simply reduces complexity (meaning its more easier to manage, implement and configure) however, depending on your background the distributed architecture and the database driven 'call centre' integration scenarios can make it get very, very complex out there for most people.

You have to be a scripter, coder, SQL, OS, Microsoft, Cisco, PBX, Data, Network, Wan, LAN, Switching, Numbering, IP Routing, HTML, Customer Service type of dude to get the most from it.
Any datacoms, voice switch and TDM background is probably a good fusion of skills but as Cisco moves to redhat you may want to add linux and unix to the set of skills you will require. Not to forget mentioning, PIX, firewall, DMZ, Internet Architectures, ADSL, SIP, Proxies, Terminal Service, H323, MGCP, etc. etc. etc.

If you are going to do funky stuff on the network you may need to know ASP, JAVA, C#, Perl, PHP etc. Its simple from one prespective and complex from another


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