Novice to voice services in general - please help me learn?

[Q6600]

I am the IT manager for a medium sized health clinic. I have been doing data for over 10 years, but I am quite inexperienced with voice services.

I have been given the task of finding a new system to support our building which I believe utilizes ~100-200 "DIDs."

I have been talking with many vendors regarding new hardware and many carriers for new services, and I feel quite a bit.. undereducated.

Can anyone suggest a good site(s) where I can read up on the _basics_ of keywords thrown at me daily like:
PRI LINES, FLEX IP, TDM, DID, ANALOG TRUNKS, ETC.

Right now we are using “old copper T1’s” and we are told that whatever route we go, “bonded PRI lines” and/or “Flex IP T1’s” are the way to go.

Ive done my own searches for general descriptions of these things individually but what Id really like to find is like a dummies version of something that ties all these mentioned technologies together with their relationship to one another.

Thanks.

 

[DocVic]

Pri is the way to go. You local CLEC will compete or beat the best bid out there and having a CLEC maintain your circuits means you have 24/7 reliability. Not that the others are bad, but most are having money problems, and their NOC's don't work 24 hours anymore. Make sure you get an account rep that is hungry for your business. If not, tell him!

DocVic
Dedicated to Nortel Products till the end.
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[johnpoole]

wish that I could say the same for the CS1000s product (r4.5)....Nortel basically put "lipstick on a pig" because it's basically an option 11c mini and I unfortunately had a CallPilot 201i platform, which is about as reliable as a sponge in a tsunami.

got to agree, if you need reliable, any single point of failure is not acceptable.. ie opt 11 platform,, and the mini was not even a good shade of lipstick.

your voip is steady because you do most of the software, upgrades layer one changes etc.. on this campus we have 21 network techs, some on which need a better attitude.. if one service is down, ie one phone will not forward, they may boot not only yhr ccm but routers, switches etc..


john poole
bellsouth business
columbia,sc