Voice over IP services are pretty much standard in the enterprise. Driven by the cost-reduction benefits VoIP delivers an excellent Return on Investment. Usually expensive to first deploy they recoup their costs over the life time of the deployment.
When planning to support VoIP consider the following points;
1) Voice and Data have to co-exist on the same network infrastructure but Voice can be affected by echo, jitter, and dropped audio. Use QoS to prioritise Voice traffic over Data.
2) Define a separate VLAN carry the voice traffic (create the VLAN then apply the interface command #switchport voice vlan [id] - on the ports carrying your voice traffic )
3) Plan for Power over Ethernet. The phones you use will require power. Usually delivered over the structured cabling, cat5e or such like, you need to be clear that your switch can deliver PoE. If it can make sure it can support the required number of handsets.
4) Plan for the traffic requirements. Voice traffic is generally smooth and predictable when managed properly. Keep in mind that packets are generally small, don't tolerate latency, uses UDP (TCP is pointless as once a word is said it cannot retransmit the data. Should a packet be lost, the conversation and therefore the traffic flow has moved on). Plan for delay to be no more than 150ms across the campus, plan for no more than 1% packet loss. Correct deployment of QoS can pre-empt these issues.
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