Migration to IP/Media Gateway Architecture Remote Sites 3

[Toni269]

We are looking to possibly integrate remote sites and are looking to lay down the telecom infrastructure to support this. I have several questions, I'm working with Avaya BP but you guys always have the best scoop.

We are currently on CM 2.0 G3si, our remote sites 2-3 of them have less than 25 employees each.

Do we need to spend 150K on our current PBX if we want to purchase a Media Gateway for a remote site?

Does 25-35K sound like the going rate for the remote site media gateway?

Does anyone use Point to Point/Frame Relay or NPLS to connect sites and if so how is the quality?

They say we save money on Maintenance and RTU Fees, how does this work?

Has anyone successfully done this and how do you like the solution compared to the cost?

 

[TykeUK]

We upgraded in a similar environment.
S8700 Migration from G3si
Software upgrade to CM 2.0
Medpro resource cards
CLAN gatekeeper cards
IP Station RTU for 6 sites plus Head Office
Agent software for CMS (400 agents/40 Sup)
In-Line Power patch panels.
Cost around £75k as far as I remember

We then deployed our remote sites with G700 media Gateways with S8300 LSP's and about 30 x 4620IP phones with powered patch panels. Each site cost around £12k + phones.

We use MPLS to connect our sites and the quality has been very good. The only downfall we saw was with the bandwidth of some of our sites. This limits the amount of calls that can be sent over the WAN.

hope this is of use - please note that the amounts could be slightly more/less as I don't have the actual figures.

 

[mrjedi]

We have done a similar thing to Tykeuk. It works great. The bandwidth issue will always be there, but you can limit intersite traffic and use the Multiple Location feature. In terms of maintenance, you have effectively one system shared across the sites so rtu's can be managed properly. I would suggest you put some QoS on the routers, e.g. put the IP address of the CLAN and MEDPRO in the routers and give them the highest priority. This helped us a lot. Then make sure you have proper QoS on your LAN if running IP phones. If you are running pcs that are application hungry, then it may be worth installing servers locally in each site. Not sure if the pricing you are quoted is too high. Sounds a lot. Special offers in UK which gives you free s8700 servers for upgrade. The only thing is that you will need to either re-type all the translations as you are changing platform or use ProVision to upload and download the data, which is not 100% accurate.

 

[ph0neguy]

You may want to ask the bp if the G3si system can handle media gateways because I don't think that it can. You have to migrate to an S8xxx solution from Avaya in order to do that. If you do get an S8700 or S8500 you can like the previous posts say use the benefits of a well managed IP network and minimize wan traffic and keep local traffic local and have success with remote gateways.