The mix of existing analog, IP and mostly wireless phones was a way for Sells to eliminate wiring labor and help its print-facility employees talk on the move and preserve the company's new analog voicemail system. Sells chose Alcatel's OmniPCX 4400 PBX because it could support not only the analog phones and voicemail application, but also the company's new IP and wireless phones. "It wasn't important that everything go IP in the phone system," says Jason Cetina, network and telecommunications administrator for Sells, which provides print services such as electronic prepress, binding and some Internet-hosting services. "We looked for a phone system that had easy mobility because we had some people changing desks multiple times."
Sells went with the Alcatel PBX over Cisco's NT Server-based PBX because it would be easier to grow the system, Cetina says. The Cisco approach uses NT Server clusters for redundancy, which can become large and unwieldy as you add more of them, he says, whereas the Alcatel OmniPCX is based on Unix and dual CPUs with mirrored disks running the same software version. "There's no interaction from the administrator to maintain the mirrored disks," he says.
The final straw for Sell's old analog system was a remodeling project a few months ago that relocated about 40 users. "We would have had to tone each line back from the jack at the back, then pull the wire pair off and punch it down to the new location," Cetina says.
Sells' Alcatel Wireless Reflexes wireless phones have the same functions as the Alcatel IP desktop phones, including dial-by-name and voicemail notification. "Wireless is the trump card that really makes life a lot easier," Cetina says. A Sells press-maintenance mechanic working on a printing press can call in the problem from his wireless handset as he works on the machine, for instance. Sells also runs a wireless LAN for the office portion of its network, with Lucent WaveLAN and Apple AirPort base stations for users' laptops.
One trade-off with Sells' IP phones is powering them. Sells plugs its IP phones into its Cisco Catalyst switches, which can't send power down the wire to the phones, except through an Alcatel pass-through device. Sells has not installed such a device because it would take up valuable rack space, so the company must add wall outlets for the IP phones. "If you decide to put an IP phone in, you must make sure you have a facility to deliver power to that phone. This can be quite a chore," Cetina says. The bay stations for the wireless phones, meanwhile, get power from the Alcatel PBX.
The biggest advantage for Sells with IP voice is having IP at the edge. "We can get more out of our WAN, transmitting traffic to our remote sites rather than using tie lines," Cetina says. "We are using a single data link to other facilities to transport voice and data."
QoS is not a big issue for Sells just yet, though. Local bandwidth is aplenty, and Sells carved out a separate voice VLAN, with top priority using Layer 2 QoS, for the IP voice traffic. So far, IP voice calls have worked just fine over the company's T1 WAN, but making sure the voice packets get priority eventually could be more of an issue over the wide area, where latency can be tricky.
"Over the next few months, we'll be applying QoS mechanisms one step at a time," Cetina says. "We want to make sure we measure the impact of our changes on the network one change at a time instead of after a wholesale configuration change."
REPORTS
ANALYTICS
Follow 
