Switching to VoIP

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition

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

The phone company missed a critical circuit switchover deadline

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and then gives the dialing party a beep to let her know she can begin her announce-

ment. If you can, limit the absolute timeout of the conference to 10 or 15 seconds to

ensure all of the paging lines are “hung up” at the conclusion of the page. Now,

instead of merely having a single phone acting as an intercom, you’ve got a group of

phones acting as a paging zone.

Keep in mind that this technique is unicast in nature—it doesn’t preserve wide area

bandwidth the way a multicast paging setup would. And, with 96 kbps per simulta-

neous paging endpoint on the LAN, you could clobber your local area bandwidth if

you have more than a few hundred phones on each zone. Yet, if your building has

lots of obstructions (like office walls), you may need to use a lot of paging endpoints

so that everybody can hear zone pages. Since there tends to be a phone on each desk,

they make great paging speakers in this situation. If the building where you’re plac-

ing the paging zone is open and has no interior walls to block the sound—like a

warehouse or factory—then you’d probably be better off using a few large, analog

speakers for zone paging.

The VoIP budget was, well, too small

The old adage “You get what you pay for” applies aptly to