Switching to H.323 from MGCP

[garcia]

Can anyone give me a quick list of pros and cons of switching to H.323 from MGCP. Someone from Cisco recommended that we switch from MGCP to H.323 in order to resolve some of the issues we're seeing on our PSTN gateways (3745s).

[thisisshanky]

H323 is fairly easier to troubleshoot on gateways compared to MGCP. MGCP has its own plus points, Centralized dial plan config, failover b/n multiple Callmanagers (you can do this with preference command and multiple dial peers in H323). H323 can become a pain to maintain and administer if your routing logic is complex as you have to configure a whole lot of dial-peers on the router, as well as some minimal set of configuration on the Callmanager. If you are running SRST on the gateway, you will need H323 configurations (anyway) as MGCP cannot work when communication to CCM is lot. Also caller-id on MGCP gateways with POTS lines does not work. You will have to use H323 in this case.

[NAVIN PARWAL]

Call preservation during failover is the most imporant feature. what that does is that if one of your callmanagers failed while the call was in progress MGCP would keep the call control up and the call would not disconnect.

Please correct me if i am wrong.

[garcia]

Are those all of the major differences? What functionality am I losing by going to H.323? If H.323 is so much better, why would anyone use MGCP?

[NAVIN PARWAL]

How important is call survivability to you is the question? In addition to less complexity and more features?

http://cisco.com/en/US/about/ac123/ac114/ac173/ac168/about_cisco_packet_department09186a008010f7d8.html

[Chris Deren]

You are alos loosing single point of management/configuration. With MGCP routing can be configured from CallManager, no need to replicate configutration on the gateway, with H323 you have to worry about dial-peers everytime you add new external route pattern.

Chris