We have a situation that involves five buildings that will require full data and voice connectivity in a somewhat rural environment (a marina). The customer's data networking guy feels confident that he can tie these buildings together using three Cradlepoint MBR-1400 routers for the data portion.

He has welcomed us to use this network to support a VOIP phone system. Since there is very limited copper connectivity between the buildings, this sounds like a viable solution. He feels that their data traffic will be extremely low, so the bandwidth for voice shouldn't be an issue.

I've seen wired VOIP work well in many instances, but never in an environment where everything is wireless. Needless to say, I'm a bit hesitant to just say yes. Since this place is pretty far away, I can't risk having a lot of callbacks.

Has anyone done this before? The total number of phones will be relatively low, maybe 4-5 per building and most will be in the main building that can be TDM sets.

I'm hoping to get some feedback from someone who has done this and am certainly open to suggestions if there might be a better way to address this. Thanks in advance.

Done it a few times with fine results. One deployment has about 12 VoIP phones connected wirelessly to the main building which is using digital phones, but it is only about 200 feet away from the main building.

I am not too familiar with wireless though...could there be issues with interference from the radios in the marina? Plus the pile of metal cannot help....

steve

We've used wireless Spectralink phones off of a Toshiba system with good success. This is at assisted living facilities where the staff gets nurse call alerts on their wireless phones so it has to be solid for them.

We did it between two buildings that were roughly 1,500 feet apart ... with a public road in between. The customer is "frugal" so we even used cheap D-Link stuff.

Worked like a charm for 2 phones and a couple of PC's.

Keeping in mind that wireless data is only half duplex and voip uses a UDP type protocol, there could be a lot packet loss due to collisions if there are not enough APs. QoS will be very important.

We do it quiet often Ed, ......works great.
But as Marv said, make sure your equip will support QoS.