Calling All Phones
With Avaya’s approach to IP Telephony, companies can use
their existing digital telephone station equipment to avoid
forklift upgrades and be more selective and cost-effective with
IP telephone deployment. Though telephone designs may vary
from those on employees’ desks to those in hallways or meeting
rooms, any digital phone can support IP-based telephone calls
on the LAN side, packetized VoIP-based calls on the WAN side,
and local calls off the LAN and into the PSTN as needed.
In addition, digital and IP-based telephones are differentiated
by the number and type of features they can support. Features
that have been available on most digital telephone station
equipment prior to the emergence of IP Telephony and VoIP
include:
Voicemail
Call transfer
Call forwarding
Call waiting (also known as call park or hold)
Multiple call appearances
Three-way (or more) conference calling
Redial
Speed dial
Message indicator to let them know they have voicemail
Migrating to IP Telephony does not have to mean that you
replace digital telephone station equipment to keep these
features. This equipment and their feature functions are interoperable
in the new IP Telephony environment.
Avaya’s approach to IP Telephony builds on existing feature
sets by adding IP-based features and functions that transform
the enterprise’s infrastructure into a converged communications
network. The added features and functions include:
Employees connect their IP telephone into the company’s
LAN. In addition, they connect their computer into one of
the ports on the IP telephone. In a startup company with
no existing cabling plant, this reduces by one-half the
number of cabling drops needed to physically connect
all employees to the LAN. This feature can add up to
thousands of dollars of savings for just one building or
location. It also reduces the complexity of the company’s
cabling plant. The lower-end IP telephone types have just
a single port to connect the phone itself.
In the POTS world, the carrier companies provide the
power from their equipment over their circuit-switched
lines to the telephone. (Ever wonder why the POTS telephones
don’t have power plugs?) In companies using
the conventional private telephone systems, the system
(PBX, or Private Branch Exchange) provided the power
to the telephones in the company. With quality IP telephones,
the power is down line loaded from the LAN
switch or the IP telephone can be plugged in at the
user’s desk.
All IP telephones support the IP family of protocols (at
least to a certain extent), so they are generally compatible
with the Web. Not all IP-enabled telephones are physically
able to support the full range of Web applications, but
IP-enabled telephones that have HTML-based displays
can support most Web-related enterprise applications.
(HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language and is the
main programming language used to program Web pages.)
IP-enabled telephones with HTML-based displays support
the following features:
• Dashboards (basically, lights and indicators on the
Web page area of your phone)
• Web browsing
• Corporate news and events
• Weather advisory display (Don’t forget your
umbrella!)
• Employee productivity
• Stock ticker
• Support for end-user defined applications and links
Other special features on selected IP-enabled telephones
include:
• Security alerts
• Access to corporate directory information via
industry standard Lightweight Directory Access
Protocol (LDAP) server
• Personalized ring patterns
• UNICODE support for native language display information.
(UNICODE is a 16-bit code that translates
every character of every language in the world.)
• Call log lists of incoming and outgoing calls
• Integrated speakerphone
• Infrared port for PDA and PC application integration
• Multiple call appearances
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