Looking at Mitel Audio Conferencing, opinions?

[PBQ]

I'm looking at Mitel AWC as an in-house audio conferencing solution. I notice the latest offering quotes a maximum of 200 voice ports. What if I need more than that? any gotchas you may know of would be greatly appreciated.

 

[IrwinMFletcher]

If you just need more ports, then you could look at another server with another instance of AWC, but if you need more ports for a single large conference, then the 200 is the limit from what I understand.

Keep in mind that 200 ports is a lot for a low/mid range server, just the interrupt rate to handle the streams alone will put a burden on the system. In other words, it's probably a desired hardware configuration that has set the limits in the application.

 

[PBQ]

Thanks. You have a very good point and I wonder if it would ever be a good idea to have a large amount of ports on one system no mater what vendor. Doing a little more digging, it would appear that though Mitel AWC can handle up to 200 voice ports, per conference call the max is 50 individual ports or attendees.

 

[slapin]

50 people in a single call will cause a disaster unless they mute themselves or chairman will control entire call. It becomes hard even with 10 participants.

Plus keep in mind that you will have to provide appropriate transport for all these ports. 200 ports will require more then 8 PRI spans. Resulting stream will be 16 Mbps which needs to be decoded, mixed, encoded and sent back.

We use a little cheating. 4-5 people create a local conference call using 3300 resources and then place another call to the bridge.

 

[IrwinMFletcher]

slapin, 50 in a conference is not a big problem since it only mixes the loudest of the people talking. Having said that I think it's understandable that conferences of that size are more dictatorships than conferences...more of a direct page with the option to reply.