Depends on what you mean by expanding your network. Do you need a bunch of new routers? Probably not. Do you need to consider port count at every station? Absolutely. However, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that most of the phones that are being recommended to you actually have a pass through port on them so you can connect your PC right to the phone. So, in a situation where there is one port and one user, you have no problem adding the phone to the scenario. You just connect the phone to the wall and connect the PC to the switch port on the phone. The bad news is that is does create a small amount of cable clutter and it does limit the speed of the PC in question to 100Mbit. So if you go this route, don't run out and get all new Gigi NICs for those PCs. They would just get pushed back down to 100Mbit once you connect them to the phone port. In situations where you have many users in a room and limited ports, the cost effective method will be to just add a switch in that room. Make sure it is a real switch though. Hubs are VoIP performance killers. If you can get new pulls in place then do so, the benefit long term is there. You might frame it as an upgrade to the 4 wire Cat-3 stuff you were asking about. Cat5 is sufficient for most cases and supports up to 100Mbit. Go to Cat5E (Cat Five Big E as it is known) which has a 350MHz frequency and you can support Gigi over copper.
I would check around for bids on the cabling. $60 a drop is very reasonable and would put you at $3600 in cabling. A worthwhile endeavor if you can slide it into the budget. If not, cautious use of local switches can accomplish the task. Again, look for QoS capable switches or at the minimum CoS (Class of Service). I doubt your Cat-3 will be of any practical use to you going into the future. I would have them pull it out when they install the new drops or tuck it out of the way. I assume your comdial phones are proprietary and connected to your Comdial PBX. That being the case, they probably would not be reusable (see the Wiki). However, you may be able to sell them off to get s few dollars back on your upgrade. Cheers, Wiley _______________________________________________ Asterisk-Users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
