Inventory of Assets: Know what you have to work with by taking a full catalogue of all your network hardware including switches, routers, servers, existing Pbx's, cabling and end user equipment. Make sure to take note of their processing power and throughput capabilities, as well as any nodes that are not VoIp aware. Also be sure to document router Os versions and Wan connections to the Internet.
You may find that some equipment may need to be upgraded, refurbished, or retired. For hardware that is not favorable on one segment, look for other areas in your society where you can reuse your existing equipment, maybe a subject office with older assets that does not need to be deployed any time soon.
MOS
Also take a good look at all of your enterprise applications, their versions, and any patches or upgrades that need to be rolled out. Now is the time to resolve which applications you can do without and get rid of the clutter, and to bring in any new or upgraded versions of applications valuable to you enterprise needs. Get current with all the patches ready for apps and operating systems as well.
Take the opening at this point to assess your current telephony environment, such as call center configurations, slow, normal, and busy calling patterns, association times, inter/intra office call patterns. All the information you gather about your current calling environment will be used to set the bench marks and resolve Slas in the new converged environment. catalogue all of your current voice equipment to resolve their usability and depreciation schedules. During deployment, you will more than likely want to keep an old Pbx or two as a backup.
The Network Assessment: One of the most important steps in planning for voice is the Network Readiness Assessment. Most VoIp vendors will supply a network estimation for you in order to resolve the parts of an existing network that want an upgrade to yield an suitable level of call quality.
For fellowships that plan to conduct their own ongoing operations, network estimation tools are available, and literally should be part of your broad network analysis software solution. Whereas the first network estimation in the planning stage is to resolve where you may need to upgrade, subsequent assessments should be made periodically on a monthly or quarterly basis to see how changes in the network are affecting performance.
Assessment tools are hardware or software based, with software being the preferable recipe as the whole network can be assessed from a centralized location. A software tool will send agents throughout the Lan and over Wan connections to remote locations, simulating voice traffic to resolve how many VoIp calls a location can deal with based on QoS and Mos indicators.
The first estimation for VoIp readiness should be made throughout an whole enterprise cycle. Simulate peak calling times for different locations, and assess other enterprise applications that reside on the network as to how they will react with the additional voice traffic, as well as their work on on call potential and QoS.
It has been noted in the manufactures that fully 50% of Ipt deployments that neglect to do a network estimation end up in failed deployments, many of them spending money on upgrading their networks were they concept they needed it, instead of where they knew they needed it.
For some smaller businesses, convergence could be as easy and cheap as installing an Asterix Pbx principles on a dedicated machine, or using a peer to peer network such as Skype to recite between subject offices. For businesses that speak their own infrastructure, failure to plan, test and assess for Ipt will literally supervene in a failed deployment marred with dropped calls, unacceptable call potential and association times, and possible disruptions of your fellowships other valuable enterprise applications.
Rules of Deployment - list of Assets and Existing Capabilities MOS
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