Ntc 242 Week 2 Dq 1

Week 2 DQ 1- What are the advantages and disadvantages of VOIP? What VoIP services exist? What equipment may be necessary in a SOHO and large enterprise environment?

I believe there are a number of significant advantages when it comes to VoIP. First off, I believe the administration of a well setup VoIP environment is much easier when compared to the old PBX days. Take for example the setup of a new user sitting in a new location. You have to get an engineer to punch down the cables on the distribution block, and then program the number into the PBX. If the user wants to move or change desks, the same engineer has to move the pair to a new location on the block and reprogram the location on the PBX. In a VoIP environment, it takes about 15 minutes to build the phone and the voice mail profile (easier if you have unified messaging), and if a user wants to move, he/she simply picks up their phone and moves it with them.

In WAN situations, voice calls from office to office are free, and this is a big help where long distance costs could be associated. You can also take advantage of least cost routing, where a user initiates a phone call from Chicago for example, and if you have an office in L.A., and he is trying to call someone outside of the company, the VoIP will dump the call out of the local PRI and it is treated as a local call.

There are also a number of VoIP services that exist, from conference and video calling, to meet me conferencing, to voice mail to the inbox if you have unified messaging setup. There are also other perks like forwarding your desk phone anywhere in the enterprise, or simply forwarding it to your cell phone if you will be out of the office for an extended amount of time.

In a SOHO environment, a pretty simple solution can be setup where a Call Manager can be deployed to handle the calls, and a few simple handsets can be purchased at a relatively cheap cost. In a large enterprise environment, you