If you were gonna do it from scratch...

[bubarooni]

My boss (a great guy, the cfo and totally clueless when it comes to anything tech but who is always eager to listen to the siren song of any reseller)sent me to a VoIP seminar the other day. My first exposure to the topic at anything greater than the vonage/skype level. I was completely drowning and need some suggestions on how you would do it and resources I can check into. I have a CCO so can access that content.

Here is my current setup:

7 seperate locations
Central Office - 60 phones
Remote Office1 - 12 phones
Remote Office2 - 12 phones
Remote Office3 - 12 phones
Remote Office4 - 12 phones
Remote Office5 - 3 phones
Remote Office6 - 3 phones

Most of my internal phone calls occur between the central office and a remote, vary rarely is it remote to remote. The central office also makes many calls to patients/customers in the remote store's regions for billing or therapy followup purposes.
Additionally, the central office makes lots of long distance phone calls to insurance companies.

Central Office and Remote's 1-4 each have an existing phone system. Remote's 5-6 do not have an existing phone system.

I currently have a site-to-site vpn running between each remote office and the central office so the remotes can access a variety of applications. The central office has a pix 506 and each remote location has a 1750 router on which the vpn's are running. I use a mixture of cable and dsl broadband to connect the sites but am looking at t1's for the cental office and remotes 1 thru 4.

At the seminar I attended (a tech consultant company and Cisco reps were there) they waxed elegantly about the '1811 ISR' router and CCM/CCME. I wouldn't mind getting my feet wet by putting in a system at remote 5 and/or 6 since they don't have a phone system. I know I probably won't see real cost savings until the central location is done.

Lets assume that I've gone thru the cost/benefit calcs/ROI and it's justified. How would you go about it? What equipment would you buy, what type of transport/connection would you use between locations, etc. I really want to educate myself on this and know how it works so any tips, tricks or advice will be greatly appreciated!

 

[jneiberger]

How would you be able to do a cost-benefit analysis without already knowing what equipment you were going to buy and the type of transport connections you were going to need? You have to factor those costs into your analysis.

Anyway, depending on other requirements, a CCME solution at your central office with SRST routers at your remotes might work just fine.

Would you be interested in removing your current phone systems in order to upgrade to IP telephony? If not, you'll need a way to connect your TDM phone systems to your IP telephony network, and that probably means you'll need CallManager, not CallManager Express, so your cost just went up.

What are your current phone systems?

 

[bubarooni]

This is true. That is why I was hoping someone with experience with the technology might be kind enough to tell me the hardware I would be needing and whether my already planned T1 upgrade would suffice.

Once I know that I was kinda thinking I might go take a look at my long distance charges per location for the last year and see how much that was and then compare the two costs.

The vendor told me I would have to dump my phone sytems and that my 1750 routers wouldn't get the job done and need to be replaced with the 1811's. They also said MPLS would be better than the T1's but that the T1's would probably do the job. They told me that generally speaking I could expect to spend about $1000 per phone at each location.

 

[bubarooni]

OH! Comdial DXP at central and DX10's at remotes.

 

[jneiberger]

What sort of T1 network are you considering? Are these point-to-point circuits, frame relay, something else? If they're point-to-point, you need to consider how you're going to handle branch to branch calls if your central site is down for some reason.

I would also recommend MPLS versus other methods, but it's typically fairly expensive in relation to other access methods, but that depends on the location of your remote sites in relation to your central site.

 

[bubarooni]

I was planning on upgrading with point to point but this was really just a matter of upgrading the connections (speed and reliability) for the application data running through the existing vpn connections.

 

[jneiberger]

Where are your remote sites in relation to your central site?

 

[bubarooni]

Physically? Remotes 1 thru 4 are each about 60 miles from the central site, remote 5 is about 20 miles and the sixth is about 90 miles.

 

[jneiberger]

If that's the case then frame relay is probably the cheapest way to go, but MPLS might still be cheaper than point-to-point circuits. I guess it depends on your provider and the sort of deal you can work out.