The good news is that should keep the environmentalists busy they can start a campaign against beavers for their wanton destruction of natural wetlands and species downstream.
For those of you who screamed you had a "right" to control the property of your service providers to tell them how they had to run their network by the simple fact that you couldn't build a network of your own.
You found that the only way to enforce that right was through the use of a gun, in other words the government. If in whatever way your twisted logic somehow decided by regulating the internet you would free it, here is just one example of the logical consequence of these types of regulations.
Wait until the special interests start lobbying the FCC for the right to force the service providers to insert disclaimers here, or block some sort of thing they declare as libel but are too cowardly to sue for.
And wait until you start paying the "Net Neutrality recovery fee" as a percentage of your monthly bill at a rate set not by any need of providing bandwidth, but by the whim and vote of unaccountable bureaucrats in the PUC or FCC or some other allegedly beneficial set of parasites.
If some government agency cares to spend several million dollars checking it out, they will find that I have falsified the info my phone company puts in the phone book too, not because I am some criminal, but because I don't want junk mail, and when anyone calls my house looking for a mister "Jubal Harshaw," I know the call is junk.
And the reason I do this instead of getting my number unlisted, is Verizon charges something like $3 a month for that privilege.
First and most important, is quality of calls. If you want to ensure voice quality, it is best to seperate your voice and data networks. They should be seperate lans, or at least VLANs if your switch can handle that and ensure that something like SQL Slammer won't fill the backplane on the switch and impact voice as well as data.
Second if it is ever necesarry for the voice traffic to be "trunked" over the same link as the data at any point. You will want to ensure you put some sort of traffic shaping box in there to reserve as much bandwidth as you need for your voice traffic. (about 80 kbps per concurrent call for uncompressed voice) If you use GSM, or any of the other different companders/compression you can change that number, but it will change the quality of the voice.
Phones: I like the Polycom SIP phones, the Soundpoint IP 501, is a 3 line phone, with a great speaker phone, and is a reasonable cost compared to some other phones.
If you are looking at Asterisk, study voip-info that is where all the info is. Also know that until you get everything working the way you want it to work, at least someone in the IT department will be kept busy. People need phones to work, and they have certain things they expect out of them.
example: If you don't put a 1 or 2 second pause of dead-air into the line between when a user makes a selection on the AutoAttendent and when the next AA or VM starts talking you will miss the first fraction of a second of the announcement because it will start before the user takes his finger off the button. And there will be tons of other little gotchas.
There are plenty of companies out there that will let you outsource your PBX and have IP phones on your premesis, and some even make financial sense (mainly because you don't have capital expenditure, and need to learn anything except how to run the handset). This doesn't sound like what you want, but it is worth checking them out. (full disclosure I work at CoreDial so I of course wouldn't mind if you checked them out.)
I also sit on my butt for a living. I was 298.5 pounds in November 2001. I dropped to 218.5 by mid May 2002. All following most of the advice in
The Hacker's Diet. And going to the gym about 5 - 7 days a week at 5AM. More discussion here. But there is only one way to burn fat off of your body, create a caloric imbalance where you are inputing less energy into your body then you are expending. Good luck.
A possibility that you can probably sell the management on is a Sun Cobalt RaQ or Qube server http://www.cobalt.com/. The Cobalt OS is based on RedHat 6.2, and it has a web interface for configuring Mail/DNS/Web sites/File Servers, etc. They are generally well done, I have occasionally run into problems, but you can sell management on the Sun name and support and still basically have a Linux box. Just make sure you grab all the latest patches for it before you make it live, and be wary, they have been slow on the security patches by a few days in the past.
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The good news is that should keep the environmentalists busy they can start a campaign against beavers for their wanton destruction of natural wetlands and species downstream.
For those of you who screamed you had a "right" to control the property of your service providers to tell them how they had to run their network by the simple fact that you couldn't build a network of your own.
You found that the only way to enforce that right was through the use of a gun, in other words the government. If in whatever way your twisted logic somehow decided by regulating the internet you would free it, here is just one example of the logical consequence of these types of regulations.
Wait until the special interests start lobbying the FCC for the right to force the service providers to insert disclaimers here, or block some sort of thing they declare as libel but are too cowardly to sue for.
And wait until you start paying the "Net Neutrality recovery fee" as a percentage of your monthly bill at a rate set not by any need of providing bandwidth, but by the whim and vote of unaccountable bureaucrats in the PUC or FCC or some other allegedly beneficial set of parasites.
Brother, you asked for it.
If some government agency cares to spend several million dollars checking it out, they will find that I have falsified the info my phone company puts in the phone book too, not because I am some criminal, but because I don't want junk mail, and when anyone calls my house looking for a mister "Jubal Harshaw," I know the call is junk.
And the reason I do this instead of getting my number unlisted, is Verizon charges something like $3 a month for that privilege.
First and most important, is quality of calls. If you want to ensure voice quality, it is best to seperate your voice and data networks. They should be seperate lans, or at least VLANs if your switch can handle that and ensure that something like SQL Slammer won't fill the backplane on the switch and impact voice as well as data.
Second if it is ever necesarry for the voice traffic to be "trunked" over the same link as the data at any point. You will want to ensure you put some sort of traffic shaping box in there to reserve as much bandwidth as you need for your voice traffic. (about 80 kbps per concurrent call for uncompressed voice) If you use GSM, or any of the other different companders/compression you can change that number, but it will change the quality of the voice.
Phones: I like the Polycom SIP phones, the Soundpoint IP 501, is a 3 line phone, with a great speaker phone, and is a reasonable cost compared to some other phones.
If you are looking at Asterisk, study voip-info that is where all the info is. Also know that until you get everything working the way you want it to work, at least someone in the IT department will be kept busy. People need phones to work, and they have certain things they expect out of them.
example: If you don't put a 1 or 2 second pause of dead-air into the line between when a user makes a selection on the AutoAttendent and when the next AA or VM starts talking you will miss the first fraction of a second of the announcement because it will start before the user takes his finger off the button. And there will be tons of other little gotchas.
There are plenty of companies out there that will let you outsource your PBX and have IP phones on your premesis, and some even make financial sense (mainly because you don't have capital expenditure, and need to learn anything except how to run the handset). This doesn't sound like what you want, but it is worth checking them out. (full disclosure I work at CoreDial so I of course wouldn't mind if you checked them out.)
I also sit on my butt for a living. I was 298.5 pounds in November 2001. I dropped to 218.5 by mid May 2002. All following most of the advice in The Hacker's Diet. And going to the gym about 5 - 7 days a week at 5AM. More discussion here. But there is only one way to burn fat off of your body, create a caloric imbalance where you are inputing less energy into your body then you are expending. Good luck.
A possibility that you can probably sell the management on is a Sun Cobalt RaQ or Qube server http://www.cobalt.com/. The Cobalt OS is based on RedHat 6.2, and it has a web interface for configuring Mail/DNS/Web sites/File Servers, etc. They are generally well done, I have occasionally run into problems, but you can sell management on the Sun name and support and still basically have a Linux box. Just make sure you grab all the latest patches for it before you make it live, and be wary, they have been slow on the security patches by a few days in the past.