Question: Cisco vs.Nortel 14

[WarbleKing]

I just got finished reading thread851-1343370 from the Cisco forum. We are debating the issue as well, however the main thing we are looking to deploy is SIP handsets. Our PBX is a CS1000M rls 4.5 that we are waiting to upgrade until a final decision is made. The above thread does not go into SIP that much. We are a standalone site with many buildings networked together but we do not have any IP trunking involved(yet). So I guess what I am trying to say is there a benefit from one system over the other, especially at the network level? Opinions about hardware, administration, costs, reliability, QOS, QOE and maintanence would be greatly appriciated as well. I would like to stay with the Nortel, because I have 14 years invested, but want to have the best solution in place. Our Network guys are pretty sharp and the majority of the network infrastructure is Cisco(with a few HP devices here and there). Thank you for the input, and I apologize if this is the incorrect place to post this, I am a newbie to this site.

 

[acewarlock]

This is what I have seen with IP/SIP Phones/Trunks, they are only as good as your Data network. In my former company we had 60 BCM's and 1 Option 11C, when the Data network was up and running, the IP phones worked great. I wouldn't want to run my business with the bad up time quaility of IP vs TDM phones.




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[tnphoneman]

My former employer sold both and the Cisco Guru after about a year finally admitted to me that the Nortel phones worked better than the Cisco. The next day I set a bottle of blue koolaid on his desk with a Nortel label on it.

All kidding aside you also need to think of the technical knowledge available. For the most part other than the data network being in the mix, the Nortel has not changed from and administrative standpoint. I have had several experiences with Cisco troubles and the voice technology knowledge is simply not up to the level that Nortel is up to. By that I mean the technical support.

Another thing is applications, do you have a call center?

Alot of things to think about but for me I would stick with the Nortel.

Not sure but I thought that the Cisco call manager ran on a windows platform and we all know how stable windows can be.

Good luck with your search but consider the uptime on the Nortel versus the data world.

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[johnpoole]

another point is, your going to talk tdm to 90 percent of the world for another 2 decades.. if i was still management i would do 70 percent tdm 30 voip on a pure nortel network.. nortel over cisco because cisco does not do analog or voice mail worth a damn.. there dig sets are ok but not better then any other dig set.. i do nortel, cisco, rolm simmons tie nec etc etc...

with sip you can support 30+ unique dig stations.. if you really want to.. unless you have a lot of teenage girls working at your site.. 90 percent of the features will never get used.. yes you can have a stock ticker scroll across the screen and the phone can remind you of meetings and maybe check your blood pressure... most users want a phone that works... dt when you pick it up, when it rings they want to screen calls and usually need voice mail..

john poole
bellsouth business
columbia,sc

 

[allenmac]

It sounds like you already have a substantial investment in Nortel voice equipment.

You can easily add VoIP to your existing PBX and still keep all of your existing infrastructure, and test small scale implementations before large scale roll-outs.

It has been my experience that close to 50% of the cost of a new telephone system is handsets, so why not leverage the existing equipment you already have?

 

[WarbleKing]

We are already running 60 IP line phonesets converged on our traditional 4000+ port CS1000M Nortel IP/TDM solution. I agree about utilizing the existing equipment, it would be the easiest solution in my opinion. Possibly more cost effective. We just mergerd our telecom and network dept, and our network infrastructure is mainly Cisco. All of our "Business Peers" are migrating to Cisco. We are looking to bring in a Cisco system to run side by side to compare and contrast to the CS1000M. I beleive that there is a Call Manager express that will handle a small deployment of IP sets, however it would be a waste of time and money to deploy if we would only have to upgrade it to a full Call Manager to support our site down the road. The regular Call Manager hardware is similar to the CSE1000E. I beleive you can run 2 Nortel call servers side by side with 5.0 software, which then we could get the CS1000E and the CS1000M running side by side (depending on the cost of course) and slowly achieve the small footprint desired rather than trying to deal with the migration path of the klunky CS1000M. If we do bring in a full Call Manager, I am pretty sure the Nortel will eventually go bye bye, because of the footprint between the CSE1000M (3 columns + 10 IPE remotes) and the regular Call Manager. Also SIP is a major componant in all of this. Cheap handsets. I don't really know how Cisco does it. It looks to me that Nortel sets them up as endpoints in the NRS. Any thought on SIP (SIP Administation) would be great!!! Both from a Nortel and Cisco view. I hope I didn't totally confuse anybody, and thanks for your input!!!

 

[allenmac]

I know of 2 large companies that demo'd both systems (cisco & nortel) side by side.

Company A has a campus with 50+ buildings and several thousand telephone sets.

The IT group was all Cisco, and was pushing to convert from the existing nortel option 81c.

The final result of the test was that the users preferred the nortel telephones, and the IT group preferred the cisco brand name. Cisco came in and bypassed the IT group and did a hard sell to the executive group with a bunch of lies:

- if you go nortel you have to change all of the cisco data equipment.

- nortel does not interoperate with any other vendors.

- cisco is the best.

etc.

The executives bought it and signed a multi-year contract with cisco. After 6 months they were looking for ways to get out of the contract because of bugs in the cisco gear causing down time, unreliable operation, configuration "difficulties" (several 911 disasters), etc.


Company B performed the same type of demo.

They found 2 groups of users and gave each access to a different system, had the 2 groups use the system for 3 months, and report their findings, then switched gear.

Both groups liked the web interface for the cisco phones, but found the nortel telephones easier to operate and substantially more reliable. Audio quality was consistently better on the nortel phones, and the reboot time for the nortel phones was quite faster than the cisco. Ease of system administration and technical support was also a clear advantage for nortel.

These cases are not ones that "I heard from someone else", and am passing along. I worked for the nortel vendor for both trials, and was part of the installation / support team for the nortel gear in both demonstrations.

I will not disclose the company names, but will say that one is a large applied physics lab, and the other is one of the top defense contractors in the US.

 

[JcBWF]

We demo'd both Cisco and Nortel for a large financial institution (approx 160K users - yes I work for the financial institution and had no leanings either way)and made the decision to go NORTEL. Better up time, better support, better scalability, better.......it just keeps going.

Perfection is expected, Excellence is Tolerated

 

[yyrkroon]

maybe this article and some of the links in it will help some.

http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/ticker/article.aspx?symbol=US:NT&feed=MW&date=20080430&id=8564615

 

[steve64]

There is absolutely no comparison between the Cisco and Nortel. Nortel wins hands down. Its more reliable, less costly, easier to administer and maintain. If you are going to go completely IP, which I don't recomend, you can do it in phased steps with Nortel. Cisco it's all or nothing. I several cases I am familiar with the Cisco implimentation has been a disaster. I've been involved with the installation on some extremely large Opt 81s with IP sets and all have gone extremely smoothly, not to mention that on the oldest of these, now over 2 years there has only been one outage of a single IP set because someone poured coffee on it. As the previous poster said Cisco will LIE about the compatibility of the Nortel IP system with the Cisco Network. It is fully compatible and if there are some problems it will be able to be traced back to the IT department having something programed wrong on their network. In an Ideal world I'd keep the VOIP network completely seperate from the data people. Yep it's expensive up from but well worth it on the trailing end.

In two words "Go Nortel

 

[mjgolli]

Nortels are phones. Period. The PBX is on a dedicated system and is similar to that which is in your neighborhood telco's central office or switching center. IP, digital or analog...this is nortel's business, not a side job. My option 11c's have never had any issues except for telco problems or downtime for updates/upgrades. They've been running straight for more than 5 years now with only one power off each, ever.

The only issues we've had with phone sets are user issues. It is amazing how abusive users can be to their rather expensive work phones...especially in our call center and out in maintenance/inventory.

Cisco is network equipment running phone software. Sure you can have a router running IP PLUS IOS with VoIP, but what is the equipment's focus? Being a router, that's what. Jack of all trades, master of none (except routing, maybe).

If you want Cisco, buy Cisco IP phones (which rock) and build up a Linux Asterisk server with chan_sccp.

And, yes, Cisco CallManager runs on Windows. Oy!

Hope this helps...
Mike G., MCSE MCDBA CCNA

 

[911guru]

The executives bought it and signed a multi-year contract with cisco. After 6 months they were looking for ways to get out of the contract because of bugs in the cisco gear causing down time, unreliable operation, configuration "difficulties" [!](several 911 disasters)[/!], etc.

And not to mention they had to pay through the nose to have the pleasure of experiencing those disasters!

911 FACTS ABOUT CISCO
===================================
It costs 2 to 3 times the Nortel solution
It ONLY works on a Cisco LAN
It uses proprietary discovery mechanisms
It is a huge single point of failure in the network
Without Cisco Emergency Responder you have only 911 dialing capabilities.
It costs extra to support it
It costs extra to support the hardware it requires
Cicso won't even bid it unless asked to reduce the cost of the bid
Due to the multiple extra servers required, the power costs almost tripple with it


How could you feel good about doing business with a company that fluffs off a basic functionality like E911?? I don't care if it cost the same, at the end of the day 12 people will judge your E911 decision that know nothing about telecom.

911Guru

http://pbx-e911.com

E911 FAQs are located at:

http://www.tek-tips.com/faq.cfm?pid=798&handle=911guru

 

[NastyNed2]

Yes, I really did mean to give a star to each person!! Thank you all very much, and keep the comments coming. Remember my thread from December? thread798-1429737

I fear we're getting the VoIP hard sell, especially from the non-phone VoIP vendor. My thread question wasn't even about brand names, it was about TDM vs VoIP. You all contributed many good viewpoints on both sides.

EVERY phone technician who has been in here from our vendor has told me bad VoIP stories. We're VoIP enabling our 61C in order to bring our small satellite offices into the dialing plan without expensive PBX and tie lines at each building. The guys here yesterday told me about a LARGE cable management company that went VoIP, and they're rebooting the phone system daily right now. They also told me about problems suporting analog. Yes, we do still need to dial in on modems and use fax machines, so 500 sets are a must.

I'm very glad to have this additional information. I'm ready to try VoIP, but only in addition to maintaining our existing TDM infrastructure, a 61C, a number of 11s, and a smattering of Norstars.

 

[allenmac]

Keep in mind,

IP was not created with real-time applications in mind. You have to be very careful when it comes to deploying to make sure that you can operate within your bandwidth budget.

My company has been deploying 100% VoIP CS1000's for the last 18 months, and we are getting ready to change our entire WAN over to MPLS so that we can get end to end QOS management for our voice traffic.

In my experience, most bad VoIP implementations are due to voice quality issues on the VoIP calls. This can be reduced / eliminated by careful planning, and following best practices during implementation.

 

[WarbleKing]

Thank you all for your input, it is a great help. 911guru can you give me some detailed info on what the Nortel 911 solution for voip would be. Your analysis on the cisco seems to be right on. The way I understand it is there is a field on the switches that has some sort of designation that is used to direct the emergency responders. However if the cabling infrastructure changes or is re-patched it will mess up the whole system. I keep hearing that Nortels solution is a lot better, but I am not sure what it is and what kind of administration will have to take place. Also Is there any integration with PS/ALI?

Thanks again everybody!!!

 

[911guru]

Great questions!

Nortel's E911 solution is a built-in function on the call server itself. It is actually part of the core code and is included with the purchase of the system. What does cost you extra (if you decide to implement it) is the LIS Location service. This is also a function on-board to the call server but activated by a keycode (~$7000 list or ~$5000 street price usually)

The internal LIS keeps a list of subnets and masks, and therefore locates phones by their IP addresses. You simply need to map your IP address space with zones in the building (1 per floor , etc.) The nice this about this is that you NEVER HAVE TO UPDATE PS-ALI!! Each zone in your building has it's own DID number assigned to it. When a caller in that are dials 911, they use that DID number for E911 reporting, so the entry is put into PS-ALI one time, and it never has to be updated. If a phone moves, then it gets a new IP address in a different subnet/mask and then uses the DID number assigned to that zone for E911.

SIMPLE!

Now granted you don;t get down to the desk for reporting, but combine this with On Site Notification, and make your zones manageable, and Public Safety knows enough to start rolling to the scene. The already know they are going to the 7th floor East side of the building or whatever granularity you decide is right.

If you want desk level reporting, then you can buy one of the 3rd party applications. RedSky is the most expensive, but does everything from soup to nuts from station location management to PS-ALI updates to the desk level. 1500 users will cost you about $50K to $60K installed, but that includes a full walk through of your facility and station by station inventory (labor intensive!) This is the same solution Avaya uses.

If you want to track phones by switchport, but still use zones, then there is a solution from eTelemetry for about $10K that does what the Nortel solution does, but via switch walks looking for the phone MACs on specific ports. This is nice if you can't break apart your zones by IP address subnets.

Cisco will try to tell you they are better because they do it to the desk. Only true on a total Cisco network. If you have other data switches, or ever get them in the future, they are limited to subnets as well. Plus if you do the CER, you need a PS-ALI management solution on top of the CER to manage the PS-ALI database. More $$$$.

This is why subnets or zones work better. Cheap, quick and easy to install and maintain. Plus there is NO DELAY in PS-ALI updates since the PS-ALI records are static all the time. ANY solution that has to update PS-ALI will cause a 1 to 3 day delay in the information getting populated into PS-ALI where the dispatcher can see it. You can see where this just isn't feasible for IP where a phone can move several times in a day!!

Public Safety and NENA (The National Emergency Number Association) LOVE subnet or zone (formally called Emergency Response Locations or ERLs). The data is always immediate and unless you have a physical change in the ERL boundaries, there is nothing to update EVER!!

Hope this provides you with some insight. There is a great podcast at

http://www.thevoicereport.com/TelecomJunkiesArchive-E911

that goes over a lot of this in detail.

911Guru

http://pbx-e911.com

E911 FAQs are located at:

http://www.tek-tips.com/faq.cfm?pid=798&handle=911guru

 

[911guru]

Also, I know the PLM for Nortel E911 pretty well, and just spent the day at his E911 Lab in NJ. (I live real close to him). Not only have I installed this stuff, but I got a cool sneak peek at some new stuff for 6.0 and some cool new auto provisioning stuff for the phones that he just installed.

In the future the phone itself will be able to tell 911 where it is, eliminating the need for a lot of this. Of course this NextGen E911 is a bit off in the future from the network perspective, and it won't all work unless it's truly end to end, but there is some cool SIP stuff being ratified this year by IETF that makes all of this technically possible. The carrier network is already in test phases in a few major cities. Then you will be able to send location, video and audio from any location that is NG 911 enabled from a NG911 device.

I'm headed to his house for some BBQ this weekend, so load up on the questions! I'll have his ear for most of the weekend.

911Guru

http://pbx-e911.com

E911 FAQs are located at:

http://www.tek-tips.com/faq.cfm?pid=798&handle=911guru

 

[WarbleKing]

Thanks 911guru, I will logon when I get home and load you up on some questions after I disect the posts above.

 

[GHTROUT]

Say hello to Fletch from all of us

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[911guru]

Will do GH! Maybe if I get him to pound a few back I'll get some inside dirt! ;-)

911Guru

http://pbx-e911.com

E911 FAQs are located at:

http://www.tek-tips.com/faq.cfm?pid=798&handle=911guru