We are currently looking at CISCO and The NORTEL BCM product lines as an entry to our VOIP offerings. Anyone out there have any advice as to the pitfalls of either product. I have been researching both and have heard horror stories with implementing both products in a WAN environment. I guess I am asking if there is anything to look out for from a manufacturer "side". I hate it when I hear things like "it will work great and your IT guy will hardly notice the draw on your network bandwidth"!

In addition, I am looking for any advantages of offering a complete IP based system over TDM. I keep asking myself if I were my customer, why would I want a CISCO AVID type system, or the Nortel BCM verses other TDM type systems. I am aware of the "toll bypass" and remote networking capabilities, but besides remote applications, why would anyone need a pure IP system? Set relocation is done on the patch system, and it would seem that adding more data to a network would be a bad thing.

I any case, we understand that the telephone world is becoming a data world, and we are in this for the long haul. So, any help is appreciated in our quest to understand and choose the proper product.

Breeze

There are several reasons to select all IP architecture. The most important is that a TDM architecture puts crazy limits on implementations. The BCM can't practically support more than 50 IP phones. You have to figure out how many PEC IIIs are necessary to do all of the transcoding between TDM and IP. The BCM is limited to 3 T1s and there are other restrictions too numerous to mention.

While from an IP perspective Cisco has a good architecture, they make two other mistakes. The first like the BCM, they are Windows based. I have used a Windows phone system before. Constant maintenance was required because of all of the security patches. You don't really want to bring your phone system down to administer security patches but better than a virus or worm bringing it down. The second problem is that they require so many servers for simple implementations. You need two call managers because of the Windows problems and you need a separate server for voice mail.

If you are looking for a simple IP solution instead of the BCM, I would recommend the 3Com NBX. It has a solid IP architecture allowing it to scale really high and runs on VxWorks so it is really reliable. It is pretty simple to set up. To set one up in the lab took me about 20 minutes. (Not exaggerating.)