Upgrade to 5.5 or 6.0

[nickwj]

Hi, a brief description of our voice network befores I ask my question. The company I work for has about 120 sites about 65 of them have a Nortel Meridian switch. About 19 of these are release 25.4 and the the others are at Rel 4.5. We use H323 virtaul trunks and have 2 NRS's. We mostly use IP for internal traffic, but some of it is routed over DPNSS links. WE use a mix of IP and TDM handsets.
My boss wants to upgrade one of the sites to realse 5.5 or 6.0. From what I knmow we would have to upgrade the NRS's and the our IP phones on the new realse site would change type. I.E. a I1140e is currently configured as a I2004 on release 4.5, but would be configured as a 1140 on release 5.0 and higher.

Question 1 is there any benefit to upgrading to relase 5.5 or highe?

Question 2 Could you see any problems with the network running 3 different relase types 25.4, 4.5 and 5.5 or higher?

Cheers Nick.

 

[allenmac]

IF your primary NRS is running in stand alone mode, then you only need to upgrade the signaling server to the highest level of software running in your peer network, otherwise you need to upgrade the CS1000 which is hosting the primary NRS as well.

I currenty have about 10 sites running a mix of 4.5, 5.0 and 5.5 with no problems.

I'm on the fence as to your first question.

 

[johnpoole]

other then the fact that rls 25 is getting close to end of life, you will not see a major bump.. 99 percent of large networks are running mixed rls without problems. if a cust has a static switch, ie very few changes, then rls is not a big issue.. i would check the lic level of your older boxes and at least buy additional lic while nortel still offers them for those rls's.. there may come a time when you need to add additional dig sets and have to upgrade if you don't have lic for those sets

john poole
bellsouth business
columbia,sc