As both a ShoreTel Certified VoIP Engineer and a CISCO CCVP I  have been working exclusively in VoIP since 1998.   For this reason,  one of the questions that is most asked of me is which is a better solution: ShoreTel and CISCO?   Since I have the sales skills of Attila the Hun, I assume that the question is being asked because someone is truly interested in understanding the architecture of the two systems.   At the end of the day  most [...]

Lets take a look at the impact of SIP – Aide from the pure technology play, SIP represents a fundamental change in the economics of the telecommunications market. The carriage of telecommunications has been in transition with a steady migration for distance sensitive to usage sensitive pricing. Historically there where three components of the cost of a telephone call: origination, interexchange (e.g. Inter-LATA) and termination. The US telecommunications market has been moving toward a consolidation of service providers. Local Exchange [...]

Sometimes there is nothing like a telephone lines mans test set to hear exactly what is going on! VoIP solutions have a double challenge: First it is hard to put a butt set on an IP connection; and secondly what happens when that connection hits a gateway at a remote site? This is always a fun situation. ShoreTel has a “trunk test tool” that has some usability. You can actually bring up the test tool, and right click a particular [...]

In a VoIP environment the WAN circuit is generally engineered to handle X phone calls of a specific codec. For example you might plan out a circuit that supports 10 simultaneous phone calls across the WAN between sites. You select the G711 codec and plan each phone call at 82KPS per call. This would require that there be a minimum of 820KB of bandwidth available or approximately 55% of a full T span. Given that the WAN connection also supports [...]

Has the economy hit VoIP? My thinking is that it has and in a very positive way for both integrators and voip service providers. Throughout my career I have always been amazed at the number of traditional key telephone systems sold into the small business segment of the telephone equipment market place. If you added up the numbers as published by the publically reporting companies in this segment, extrapolated an average SBE equipment size requirement you would conclude that every [...]