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I had the enjoyable opportunity over the last few weeks to jump in and do a basic Cisco voice install. It was about 110 phones, with the Cisco Unified Communications Manager Business Edition. This is a single box that includes Call Manager 6.1.3, and Unity Connection 2.1. It had to be done fast, and it had to be done right, so I stuck to mostly tried and true configurations. 

Since this was a price sensitive design, we used the 2800 router to its maximum potential. The 2800 is an amazingly flexible piece of equipment; it can be configured to do large variety of things. Sometimes known as the Integrated Services Router, or ISR, it can be set up as a router, firewall, VPN, Voice Gateway, SIP session border controller, transoder, conference bridge, and survivable remote gateway, all at the same time, on the same box! read more »

I recently did a somewhat complex install of a Cisco 2800 Integrated Services Router. I enabled many of the features that come standard in the Advanced IP Services IOS, and thought it would be useful to show what a relatively current configuration would look like.

What made this installation fun was the use of object groups on the 2800 router. That is a new feature in the 12.4.20T version of code that made things interesting. The router has a GUI, but of course everything was set up in command line. I learned some neat things from this install, and based on the experience, I created a clean reference config for discussion purposes. This example is for the NAT and VPN, I will leave the voice configuration for a different example. Also, I did not set up SSL VPN on this box, nor did I use the newer version of firewall – this one is based on CBAC. read more »

Money is tight these days, and only the most essential projects are getting funded. In the data networking realm that means all projects have to show tangible immediate benefits, and save money to boot.

In the Return On Investment discussion, these can often times be split out into hard dollar and soft dollar cost savings. Hard dollar costs are what the organization pays out in cash every month, quarter, and year. For example, PBX lease payments, voice trunk line charges, or call center staffing level, are  all examples of hard dollar costs to which savings can be applied. read more »

Last year we learned a lesson about POE switches the hard way. Cisco had some nice new gigabit phones start shipping, and had been shipping gigabit POE switches to power them. One of our customers wanted gigabit ethernet to their desktop, so we specified the gig phones with the gig switches. Since all the switches were going to be in one closet, we recommended four 48 port POE switches, along with 120 POE phones. Everything was going great, until we started putting the phones out on the desktop. read more »

The Asterisk open source phone system has always been a favorite of mine. I used it to help me out of a SIP jam a few years back, and for many years I have wanted to be able to put together a good system for customers using Asterisk, but have not been able to create something sufficiently compelling.

Although I primarily work with Cisco Unified Communications, and think it is the best overall UC system in the market, I had become frustrated when trying to come up with designs for less than 100 phones that were competitive from a standpoint of features and price.

For example, there was one company just down the street read more »

Two and a half years ago Cisco came out with Call Manager version 5. There were a few notable changes in this release. Besides running on linux, it was the first version that supported both SIP phones and SIP trunks. As fortune would have it, one of our customers at the time had more prescience than I, and had researched the cost savings capabilities of using a SIP trunk for PRI replacement. Since I have never shied away from deploying the latest Cisco voice technology, we agreed to put the system in place.

The cost savings of the SIP trunk is what funded a majority of the deployment. read more »

I was on the phone with a customer the other day discussing issues with the current installation we were doing for them. Even though all the web filtering system was set up properly for them, the customer had an expectataion that we would set it up in a different manner. The scope of work was unclear, and the lead deployment engineer said that we had had the discussion on how to set it up, with customer agreement, but apparently there was a communication gap at some point.

Because we value our customer relationships, we decided to do the additional work at no cost. read more »