VoIP Wireless solution on the cheap?

Hi all,

I look after the network for a major industrial complex, and I've been handed a request from one of our teams that I could do with some experienced advice on.

We have to shut down parts of our plant for maintenance on a regular basis, and while they work on them they build a village of portacabins next to the plant to house the workers and planners. Traditionally they simply got contractors in to run a fibre to the nearest building with network connectivity, a multi-core phone cable to the nearest DP and just wired the village as needed. After 6 weeks or so, the wiring was simply cut away and ditched when the village moved on to the next job, costing us thousands each time.

I convinced the teams that going wireless would save them a fortune, and I've implemented changes that have got them using a wireless controller and LWAPP access points linked into our Cisco LAN, and it's all lovely. Unfortunately the phone system on site consists of old BT iSDX's and Siemens HiCom switches running on 70's vintage wiring, so we still need to run cables for the cabin phones as we have no IP gateway. The team have asked if I can eliminate even that, and that means VoIP.

I've spent the past week playing with Trixbox, 3CX, sipX and all the various softphones, and it looks pretty simple to set up extensions and so forth using a spare server and the software. I'm a bit lost when it comes to the gateway side of things though, as whatever I try to build would need to interface with either an iSDX or HiCom to get access to the outside world and the rest of the sites extensions. To be honest I'm not even sure if wifi is the way to go, since we'll have to use softphones and USB handsets of some kind, and I dont know how bandwidth intensive that will be.

Have any of you done such an installation, limited as it is. I'm looking just to get a hundered or so extensions linked via a gateway of some kind, I'm not looking to run the whole 2500 extensions on site right now, but I need to know what I'm planning has a chance of working. Should I go with a stand-alone gatway such as Audiocodes or Vegastream make, or should I stay Cisco and go for some sort of integrated services router? Any thoughts on this sort of deployment?

Hi!,

I think WiFi technology is not still ready for VoIP communications. At least not for an entire Wireless solution in that sense. You can have one or two wifi phones attach to a wireless network (most likely a centralized network as you can build with a wireless controller from cisco to avoid roaming issues), but it is still a dream a stable solution for more than 4 phones per AP.

If your customers want to save cabeling cost by going wireless, tell them the big cons that this kind of worst practice scenario can do to their business.

Thanks everyone!

<snip>No self-promo in sigs please</snip>

I am sorry your original postings did not get replies earlier.

Have you found a solution now? It seems to me that a voip system is perfectly possible and perhaps ideal for these circumstances. I imagine there are voipuser members who may have experience of similar installations.