Description:
Everyone with a dedicated WAN connection is implementing on it some kind of Voice over IP solution these days. The setup process is too easy, the cost too low, and the quality of service too high to ignore this application of your data channels. Cisco Packetized Voice & Data Integration might be the best practically oriented Voice over IP (VoIP) book around, if you want to do some reading on the topic. If you're looking for a more academic treatment of the standards and concepts that underlie VoIP, you'll want to supplement it probably with Uyless Black's Voice Over IP or another mostly conceptual text. But engineers with a job to do will appreciate author Robert Caputo's willingness to share stories and lessons from his life's work. Caputo has earned praise for helping to blur the distinction between "voice people" and "data people," a schism that continues to rule many organizations and should be eliminated as voice-over-data solutions become more popular. This book explains voice concepts (PBXs, telephone signaling, and so on) in "data people" terms. It also discusses thoroughly IP concepts such as Quality of Service (QoS). Focusing mainly on the Cisco 3600 family of routers and their voice cards, Caputo gives detailed configuration instructions that include dial-plan design, connectivity with analog phone equipment, and interconnection of geographically separated PBXs (PBX trunking). You'll find plenty of fully listed configuration files here. Bear in mind that this book focuses on VoIP exclusively, without much more than a nod to the specifics of VoIP implementation under Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM). There's just one chapter on Frame Relay; this isn't a problem, just a characteristic. Turn to Oliver Chukwudi Ibe's Essentials of ATM Networks and Services for details on ATM, and Jeff Buckwalter's Frame Relay: Technology and Practice for more information on Frame Relay. --David Wall Topics covered: Implementation of a corporate voice infrastructure on an IP network, particularly one that's based on Cisco Systems routers. There's an overview of VoIP technologies here and an introduction to telephony concepts for data-network engineers. Quality of Service (QoS) gets plenty of attention, and there's a detailed explanation of how to develop a system of phone numbers and network addresses (a dial plan). A series of sample configurations, in addition to one that includes an IP voice trunk between two geographically separated PBXs, concludes this volume.
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