The voice-over-IP setup replaced two different proprietary phone networks and eliminated some of the company's dedicated T1 circuits. "We were running four T1s for the data side and four for voice, and we had different phone systems. So we were able to get rid of eight T1s and consolidate into a single T3 for about half the price and five times the capacity," says Deardorff, who works at the company's Baltimore site. The company is saving about $3,800 per month in dedicated circuit costs, he estimates.

BD Biosciences' 45-Mbps pipe is divvied up among voice, video and data traffic. The company's Cisco Systems 7200 series routers consolidate the voice and data traffic onto its metropolitan-area network. And the routers' priority-queuing feature prioritizes video traffic over other data traffic. The company has a dedicated T1 service for voice.

Desktop videoconferencing over the switched Ethernet LAN is big at BD Biosciences, mostly because it saves users from traveling among the company's six buildings spread across Baltimore. "The biggest advantage to LAN-based videoconferencing for your group stations or desktops is that you aren't required to have a special line run in a specific room," Deardorff says.

It's not ideal, however, when users run a desktop videoconference with three or four people sitting around a table, he says. "This is one-to-one or one-to-many technology, and you may get some minor clipping when you do a large group LAN-based multipoint videoconference," he says. BD Biosciences also discourages users from combining conferencing applications: "The quality is never as good when you start mixing and matching your manufacturers," Deardorff says.

On the voice side, Deardorff and his team have experienced a few minor outages, the longest of which lasted 122 minutes. The problem: a clocking discrepancy between its Cisco router and its DS-3 pipe from Bell Atlantic Corp. "The router detects another clock, and tries to synchronize with it, but Bell Atlantic says it doesn't provide any clocking on its circuit," Deardorff says. So BD Biosciences has to reset the module or reload the router code.

Even with all this notoriously bandwidth-greedy traffic, BD Biosciences hasn't run into any Quality of Service issues with its data traffic. "We haven't established any priority settings for our standard office applications--we just haven't seen any performance impact," Deardorff says. Generic data applications, such as Lotus Notes and file-sharing, aren't likely to need special treatment, but when more audio and graphics-heavy Internet needs or SAP applications come online, then performance could get strained, he says.