Implementing VOIP Help

Hi.

We are opening a second office in a couple of months and are not sure what the best choice of network infrastructure is. Currently in our main office we have a VOIP Capable PBX and DSL for our internet access. The DSL Connection is sufficient for internet access but at times is slow or drops for a few moments.

We are opening a second office around 30 miles away. The office will have around 10 telephones in it. The plan was to use VOIP from that office to our main office. There original thought was to get rid of the DSL, and buy a T1 at each facility, and use those T1's for both internet and VOIP.

My thought was to instead use a private T1 to connect the sites. All VOIP traffic, and any site-site network traffic would utilize that. Then we would get DSL at the new site and we would still use DSL For all our internet access.

Any thoughts on which would be best? I am not that familiar with VOIP and don't really know if any Internet T1 would be sufficient with respect to latency and all things that make the call quality good.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Shawn

Hi Shawn,

Welcome to VoIP User.

How many simultaneous calls do you anticipate requiring to send over the office interconnect ?

Quote:

Internet T1 would be sufficient with respect to latency

It should be good, but you have a bandwidth limitation of 1.54mb/sec (from memory). Main thing to ensure is that you're not going to saturate that pipe.

Quote:

any site-site network traffic

Flowing over the same T1 pipe is not a good idea in my opinion - you risk losing all the advantages that a dedicated line such as a T1 offers, unless you were proposing to have QoS routers at each end and prioritise the voice traffic?

Dean