Introduction

You have a choice, thanks to technological advancements in networking, and for those you reading this, especially for the feature rich hardware and software of Cisco. Your telephone calls can be made with little or no involvement of your telephone company. In years past, you had to purchase telephone service in the form of lines and numbers to enable your organization to communicate via voice and fax. If you were an organization of any meaningful size, the cost of these lines may have been quite prohibitive. All of this is possible by the convergence of voice and data over the same network.

Establishing telephone calls (voice, fax, or analog modem) over data networks using Internet Protocol (IP) now seems inevitable, given the benefits. VoXX implementations become even easier to justify if you have available capacity on your data networks to support voice traffic. One of the main driving factors for deploying voice over IP (VoIP) networks is the cost savings associated with doing so. Cisco has become quite a leader in forging ahead with robust VoIP solutions, from transport device to user- and network-friendly telephones. In this chapter you will also be introduced to VoIP and its configuration on a variety of Cisco products.

Throughout this chapter are several diagrams of network design concepts. We detail specific equipment and configuration issues. This chapter also highlights the opportunities in moving to a packetized voice architecture.

Most companies have spent exorbitant amounts of money to install and maintain their telephone equipment,...