IP telephony solution

[littlen]

I am in my last semester @ college in a Data Communications degree. For my senior project I have to come up with a project. This goes from a proposal to the the write up of the actual installation. My proposal is to upgrade a local school district's voice network to a digital IP telephony solution through you using your call manager and IP phones. Their current voice network is at capacity and with construction and demand for phones in the classroom updating the system would be both expensive and labor intensive. In place is a fiber WAN between the three buildings and the entire networked is switched and running at 100Mbs. They wish to upgrade everything to digital except for a few legacy systems such as alarms that require analog outside lines. This would also free up their current voice network.

I attended COMNET the other day where you had a booth. I talked to a rep for just a moment .before he got a call on his cellphone and had to take it. When returning to the booth several times later I was unable to talk to anyone because of the amount of people there. All reps were busy. Is there any papers or guides that I could be sent with information on your solutions.

While at the event I also attend a presentation by one of your reps on Enterprise IP telephony solutions. I was impressed on the capabilities the systems that were shown and I did learn alot at that presentation.

I understand the installation of the Call Manager but a question I have concerned how it is connected to the PBX system and the outside lines.

Thank you in advance,

Nathan Little

PS: I'm unsure if I'm asking this in the proper place. If I am, please direct me to the correct person.

[dugrant]

Here are some links that will get you started:

This link contains TONS of information, if you can manage to read through all of it, you will be well on your way:

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/788/solution_guide/

Here is a white paper on choosing a voice gateway in order to connect to the PSTN or to a PBX:

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/ga/prodlit/gatwy_wp.htm

There are also a few books published by Cisco:

Cisco CallManager Fundamentals: A Cisco AVVID Solution

Voice over IP Fundamentals

Integrating Voice and Data Networks

Deploying Cisco Voice Over IP Solutions

As for your last question, you integrate with legacy PBX's or connect to the PSTN (public switched telephone network) using a Voice Gateway. There are several different types of gateways, but they all do the same basic thing: convert legacy analog and digital voice connections to VoIP.

-Dustin