Switching to VoIP

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition

Copyright © 2007 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

Preface

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xvii

chapter, apply that chapter, and come back to learn more. IT professionals, a large

piece of this book’s target audience, are often the type of people who learn best by

doing, so that’s how the material is presented. In fact, you’ll notice that the book

looks at telephony more from a packet networking engineer’s perspective than from

a telephone network engineer’s perspective, even going so far as to apply the OSI

model to telephone systems, which were invented decades before the OSI model

was.

But anybody who’s new to VoIP should get a handle on its terminologies, implica-

tions, and scope by reading this book. IT managers, telecommunications directors,

and hands-on CIOs will all benefit from the proper (and one might say refreshing)

perspective this book has toward Voice over IP—not the textbook perspective of a

legacy telephone system engineer, but the hands-on viewpoint of an IP networking

pro who recently completed a number of legacy-to-VoIP system conversions. In this

case, it can truly be said that I am cast from the same mold as my readers.

Prospective VoIP adopters, Cisco-certified network specialists, and those with a per-

suasion toward open standards may want to read this book on account of its vendor

neutrality. Linux, Windows, and Mac solutions are discussed, ...