[cisco-voip] RE: Nortel vs. Cisco IP Telephony deployment

[Steve G]

Thanks for the reply Lelio. Today we are a Nortel PBX shop, so Nortel is 
deffinatly a player. Perhaps the largest + that Cisco has going for them is
their presence on a weekly bassis. By making hardware readilly available and 
coming on site every week to help with LAB and design puts them
 way ahead. I can't remember the last time a Nortel Rep was at our location 
to see how they can sell us products in the future. Cisco may not be
 the absolute best in any 1 area, but they will support the heck out of 
their products. At least that is my experience.
 Steve
  ------------------------------

Overall I have been impressed with Cisco CallManager and Unity. There
have been things which I have not been pleased with, but let's be
serious, every vendor/product has their weaknesses. If you are
migrating from an existing solution to a new solution, then I would
strongly suggest evaluating what your current system can do now and
what the proposed system can do very carefully. Take promises of
features with a grain of salt and don't expect those to come to
fruition any time soon - plan on deploying what you can see in front
of you. And don't underestimate the importance of any one feature - or
in our case any one person that might be using that feature. ;)

There are many features that are common place in other PBXs that for
some reason are not in the Cisco product, e.g. forwarding from
secondary lines and PLARs, and require additional steps and or
programming to make things work. In the case of forwarding secondary
lines they will point you to the user's phone configuration web page -
since there is a solution, there has been little effort to including
that as a feature. In the case of a PLAR, you have to create a special
class of service for that phone which only contains one dialable
pattern - a lot of work if you have a lot of PLARs with different
destinations. Other systems have a dialdown field parameter. In
actuality, many of the features you might need require seperate
classes of service definitions to make them work. That's one of the
things that I don't like. Not scalable in my opinion.

The other thing I've found difficult to deal with is the lack of
documented changes in the upgrade cycle. There are some documented
changes but many are missing. Phone upgrades in particular seem to
change quite a bit of the asthetics of the phone without any sort of
documentation whatsoever! Enterprise and System Parameter changes are
not documented in new releases so you have to sort through them to see
what might be missing or added - with over 300 of them, it is time
consuming.

Your deployment is similar to ours, except ours is a central campus
with ~7500 phones. We've deployed 6 servers - publisher, TFTPserver
and four subscribers, two each for our distinct groups - business and
residence. An upgrade can take the better part of the whole day.

I'm sure others will join in in the discussion..... ;)

-----                                                                -----
Lelio Fulgenzi, B.A.                                  lelio at
uoguelph.ca.eh <https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-voip>
Network Analyst (CCS)
University of Guelph                             FAX:(519) 767-1060 JNHN
Guelph, Ontario N1G 2W1                          TEL:(519) 824-4120 x56354
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  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Steve G 
  To: cisco-voip at puck.nether.net
<https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-voip>
  Sent: Saturday, May 28, 2005 12:24 PM
  Subject: [cisco-voip] Nortel vs. Cisco IP Telephony deployment


  Hi Again,
       Does anyone have experience with comparing Nortel's VoIP
solutions with Cisco's?  I am currently evaluating the two beasts and
so far have only got my hands on Cisco's CCM 4.0(1) and a Unity
Server.  I must say they are pretty slick products.  I have no
experience with Nortel equipment as of yet, and would like to know if
there are any caveats to either one that would rule it out of the
comparison.

  Background:
  Deployment size will be 10,000+ phones at the end of the project.
  All Cisco Data network is existing.
  40 WAN locations (Frame Relay) would talk to a Centralized CP and
have SRST enabled routers.

  Any help would be great.  +s and -s of the two products would be appreciated.

  Steve
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