Hal -
You are absolutely on the $. I know for a fact (been there, seen with my own eyes)that a VERY major NYC corporation has had nothing but grief in their conversion from TDM to VOIP.
It used to be that the major corporations had a VP for Voice and a VP for Data. The SVP of "Communications" could have come from either side. Starting about 15 years ago the SVPs ALL started coming from the Data side of the house.
Well, at this company I really can't name publicly (PM me if you like), the IT weenies decided that the 5,000 line TDM switch had to go and Cisco would come in.
Since that happened, you can now walk in to an office in Atlanta, sign on to a phone with your logon and get all your calls sent right there. That's useful isn't it? For about 5 minutes a week maybe.
Back home in the main office in NYC, they found that in order to keep the QOS up to something reasonable they had to run separate Vertical and Horizontal cabling just for Voice! Not only wouldn't the risers handle the traffic, the station cables overloaded.
Whhoops! What happened to the big savings?
And the ACD? Whoops! That doesn't work either.
And, and, and.......
No one will own up to it, but there are a lot of senior people that are real unhappy about this. But because they all signed off on it, they're afraid of letting the cat out of the bag.
Big or small, TDM is the answer for voice in 95% of the circumstances.
Sam
