Voice over IP (VoIP) solutions promise all manner of cost savings, increased flexibility
over traditional Private Branch Exchanges (PBX), and faster time to production
for additional telephony solutions.The major point is a faster return on
investment for the solution itself.This chapter focuses upon the many factors present
in bringing the benefits of Voice over IP to a single site solution. Further, it
discusses the cost and engineering issues that surround single site solutions,
because these issues will be the definitive mitigating factors that determine if
Voice over IP is right for you.
This chapter will introduce you to Cisco’s VoIP solution for single sites, how
to design for it, what to watch for in the way of the network infrastructure
changes, and some plain old common sense factors that might just make some
decisions for you.We’ll present the core Cisco solutions for single sites, but these
solutions are more appropriately geared towards smaller sites in the less than 25
users category.The solutions, however, can also scale upwards to handle nearly 100
users with a few changes, which will be mentioned as the solutions are presented.
In later sections of the chapter, you’ll be introduced to two newer parts of the
AVVID solution—IP/TV and IP/VC solutions.These bring the benefits of
broadcast television and two-way video conferencing to small and single sites,
which offer the immense benefit of dramatically reducing travel costs and
speeding changes out to the field users.You’ll learn how these two solutions can
benefit you, and how sometimes they are more of an evil than a benefit.