Guide to implementing and running a Mitel VoIP system. This is a companion guide to the VoIP Introduction Guide. This guide explains the Mitel VoIP

Transcription

1 Simple n tworks. Period. MITEL PLANNING GUIDE Guide to implementing and running a Mitel VoIP system. This is a companion guide to the VoIP Introduction Guide. This guide explains the Mitel VoIP alternative in detail.

2 Mitel is one of the three main alternatives for a Voice over IP (VoIP) system. Here s a discussion of how you would acquire, install and operate a Mitel system. First, some basics. A Mitel system has four main components: Call control which is the process of creating, monitoring, and tearing down calls, and of providing additional communications services when needed. PSTN connections which are the connections from the VoIP system to the public switched telephone network. These are used for calling outside the organization. IP handsets which are the end devices that people use to access and make use of the VoIP system. Added applications which Mitel excels in. These are software additions to the basic call control that use those call control feature to provide more advanced communications services. MXe3300 controller Call control is done in a specially-designed 2U-high, rack-mountable appliance (NOT a PC) called the MXe3300 controller. This appliance runs the VX-Works operating system, NOT Windows or Linux. VX-Works is used by the Space Shuttle, Mars Rovers, pacemakers, many industrial controllers, and other things that simply can t go down, and Mitel chose it because of this nonstop advantage. The controller attaches to an Ethernet network with a 100 MBPS connection, or with two connections if you want to connect it to different switches or switch modules for redundancy. Call control that connecting, monitoring, provisioning, and then tearing down of calls is handled in nonvolatile RAM on the system board. This makes it a very efficient call processor, and a single MXe3300 can control up to 1,400 IP phones and other devices. The controller can come with redundant, hot-swap power supplies and redundant, hot-swap hard drives. This significantly increases the reliability of the system for a small additional cost. We install all of our VoIP systems with controllers that have redundant power supplies and hard drives. There s a smaller version of this controller that s suitable for local call control for remote sites. You have several options for call control for remote phones, as we ll discuss later. Sometimes it s appropriate to have a lightweight controller installed locally in a remote site, and if so Mitel has that option. You can also make the MXe 3300 controller resilient, which means that you install two of them and then one controller automatically backs up the other one. If one fails the phones associated with that controller automatically migrate over to the backup controller. Most of our clients do this, because the controllers are pretty inexpensive. This takes the call control system reliability from five-or-six nines reliability to eight-or-nine nines reliability. In fact, we have been selling Mitel VoIP for nine years and have never seen a system outage on a resilient system. The Mitel call controller can also be virtualized under VMWare. It s currently the only controller with VMWare certification. We here at MXN run our own phone system over a series of rack-mounted Hewlett-Packard servers under VMWare. When you call us you re running through a virtual system, through some SIP trunks (virtual phone lines on Ethernet) and then out over a regular Internet connection to get to MXN.

3 A Mitel MXe3300 controller is actually three controllers in one. It s a controller for Mitel phones, it s also a SIP (Session Initiation Protocol, the standard for IP telephony communications) controller that can accept SIP-based trunks from the telephone network and also control SIP phones, and it s also a conventional TDM PBX that can control regular analog phones. It can do one or more of these or all of these different types of control at the same time. This can come in handy if you re planning a transition from conventional phones to IP phones. Here s an example: one of our clients had a failing PBX that he couldn t get spare parts for or service on. This PBX supported a lot of analog phones. We simply replaced that old PBX with an MXe3300 controller, connected the existing phone lines to the controller, connected his PRI to the controller, and programmed the existing phones on the controller. Now he has the same service he had for his existing phones, a call control system that s fully supported (and support costs less now), he gets to keep and use his analog phones, and he has a lot more free space in his phone room. When he needs to add more phones he ll just attach IP phones to his data network. The controller can also connect to other analog devices like faxes, modems, and specialized analog phones that you d never suspect were phones. Do you have a loading dock? You probably have a push-button announcement system on the outside wall. Or a locked door with an annunciator panel? Both of these are analog phones. Have an elevator? You probably have an emergency phone in it. Yep, another analog phone that will need support. You can just plug them all into the controller. Every VoIP system needs to connect to the Public Switched Phone network (PSTN, or local phone company) to make what are called outside calls. The MXe controller can connect to that network in one of three ways, or connect in all three ways at the same time. The first is through conventional analog phone lines. The back of the controller has six ports for them, and you can add many more through external boxes. The second way is through a T-1 or PRI, and you can connect up to sixteen of these to a single controller. The third way is through the newest type of connection, SIP trunks. Remember that the controller is also a SIP controller and can control both SIP phones and communicate through SIP connections. A SIP connection is brought into your Ethernet network through one of your switches from Metro Ethernet or a like service and then sent to the controller over your data network. You can run many separate phone calls through a single SIP trunk running on Ethernet, much as you can run multiple calls on a single PRI. You can add dozens of them to your controller if you need to: we here at MXN have almost two dozen to support incoming calls, conferencing, marketing and technical support, and are adding three or four at a time when we need to support a new service or increase our calling capacity. The controller has more than 800 call control features, which puts it on par with a very large conventional PBX of the kind that a Fortune 100 company might use. One of these many features is paging, and any controller can do up to sixteen separate zones of paging right out of the box with no additional hardware or software needed. There s also music on hold, conference calling, a full ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) engine, and built-in voic with automatic voic -to- integration. So you can run a complete, full-featured phone system out of a single 2U-high, rack-mounted appliance, and run it well past five-nines reliability. IP handsets are the next component of a system. These range in cost and features from a simple, low-end handset with a one-way speakerphone and a small display up through a very high-end phone with a two-way speaker and a large color display that can be used as a web browser and a recipient of other HTML content. These are all fairly inexpensive, and if your frame of reference is digital phones from PBX manufacturers you will be pleasantly surprised. Each of these phones has a two-port Ethernet switch built into it so you can connect up a PC and share a network drop or more properly, disconnect your PC from the wall outlet, plug in the phone to that outlet, and then plug in the PC to the phone. This keeps you from having to install more cabling to support a VoIP system.

4 You can also buy any SIP phone, connect it to your data network and use it as an IP endpoint to a Mitel controller. And as said, you can also use any analog phone and do the same thing. Some of our clients install free SIP applications on smart phones and use them as wireless phones. If you use Mitel phones, however, you get 128-bit AES2 encryption of the phone conversations and the management traffic between the controller and the phone. This is a big deal if you need to conform to HIPAA or PCI standards. Having this automatic encryption also means that you can take any Mitel phone anywhere in the world, plug it into a local broadband Internet connection and talk without having to set up a VPN. That s what we do here at MXN. You can make a remote IP phone resilient to a local analog line by adding a module to the back of the phone and attaching a local analog phone line to the module. If the WAN connection between the controller and the phone goes down the phone automatically uses the local analog line to make calls. It s a very inexpensive way to add system resiliency in remote locations without the expense of a separate controller. Call Center Teleworking Twinning Unified Messaging Mass Notification Reporting Telepresence Microsoft Integration Add-on applications are very handy but optional things that you don t have to pay for if you don t need them. And these are one of Mitel s great strengths. They are based on and use those 800+ call control features in the physical or virtual controllers, and add more capabilities. You choose which ones you want and then just buy them as software applications. The easiest way to get most of them is to invest in a Mitel Applications Server, or MAS. It s a base application that holds the individual enhanced applications, which are then bought a seat-at-a-time for just those users who need them. A MAS can provision these enhanced applications for as many as 1,000 users, so it s appropriate for small-to-midsize organizations. The MAS sits in a single rack-mount server that you can provide, or that we can provide.

5 What are these applications? Well, the one that almost everyone springs for is unified messaging. Recall that voic with integration is already built into the MXe controller. You can certainly use that messaging application, or for about the same price you can get a more feature-rich set of unified messaging that includes the ability to set up individual messaging and call-handling accounts, fax integration and other goodies. Another popular application is one called teleworker, which we use here at MXN quite a lot. This allows you to take any Mitel IP phone, attach it to any broadband Internet connection in the world, and communicate securely back to the controller as a local extension. This is great for home workers, for disaster recovery, or for traveling people who need to quickly set up a remote presence with all of the features of a local office. Here s Bob s home office phone, connected to a Comcast Internet connection through his house electrical wiring to a Linksys router two floors away. Bob appears as a local extension off the MXN virtualized call control application running on multiple HP servers in a Norcross, GA data center. He grabs one of a set of SIP trunks running from that data center on redundant Ethernet connections when he wants to place a phone call. Bob can take this phone anywhere he travels in the southeast and have the same services that he does in his office. Note Bob s wireless handset (no cord at the end!) that he can use up to 300 feet away from the phone. (candy canes optional) Here s a diagram of that remote connection: Internet Another popular application is called dynamic extension, which automatically twins up to eight phones in a single ring group. When someone s public number generally their office phone number is dialed all of the phones in the ring group ring, and that person can answer the call on any one of them. But it gets even neater. Someone can be rolling down the road and take a call on their cell phone. And they can then transfer that call to some IP phone located on the home network. Or, perhaps, to an IP phone temporarily located in China on a broadband Internet connection. There are other applications, like a world-class call center application suite with skills-based routing and supervision, scoreboards, integrated fax and guided web browsing that you can add a module at a time. There s a very elegant mass notification system for large organizations that have to get the word out quickly and in a variety of different modes. There s also a reporting and analysis module that mines the SMDR information on the controller about all calls and automatically presents it to managers by .

6 And there s also a very high-end telepresence system that uses the call control of the MXe3300 to switch highdefinition audio and high-resolution video communications. It s about half the cost of the market leader s product, has better picture and sound quality, is easier to use just use a Mitel phone to dial another conference room and runs in half the bandwidth. You can also integrate a Mitel VoIP system with Microsoft messaging and collaboration services we have recently done this for a large, ten-campus college, and it works rather well. If you want to really get the mileage out of what you have already paid for in your Microsoft licensing here s a way to do that. You can also integrate a new Mitel VoIP system with your existing PBX and essentially run VoIP out of the side of what you already have to support additional phones in difficult places, or to implement new communications features you can t get otherwise. What does it take to get a VoIP system installed? In most cases, much less than you think. Remember that all call control applications are buried in a limited number of (resilient) controllers. It normally takes a few days to program and test configurations on the controllers, and this is done off-site. Then it s a matter of Hooking up IP phones, Connecting to the PSTN, and Installing an applications server and switching on applications. There s also a short exercise of configuration of your existing data network to support the new VoIP system. This includes tagging a separate voice VLAN to each network port, turning on LLDP, and perhaps establishing transmission priority for the VoIP service. If you have a network management system you can use that to blow out a VoIP configuration overnight. The trick is to know exactly how to change the configuration of the network to support voice, and we know how to do that very well. Your staff would then do the phone installation, after about five minutes of training. Don t have five minutes to spare on training? Then just look at this diagram: How to Install an IP Phone in Five Easy Steps 1Connect the phone to a network drop 2 (optional) Connect the phone to the PC 5 Press the blue button 3 Press the * key three times Congratulations, you re trained! 4Enter the extension number using the dial pad

7 The usual VoIP installation takes a week or perhaps two weeks, and you can run your existing phone system while it s going in. This allows you to test the new one completely before the cut-over from the old to the new. Users can have two phones on their desks during the transition. The ability to gateway from the new system to the old one means that you can convert parts of your user base at a time. Of course you d want support for a newly-installed VoIP system, and we have a couple of programs for you. If you d like to self-support and have a direct technical relationship with Mitel second-and-third-level technical support, with the ability to order replacement parts directly from Mitel, we can sponsor you to advanced training and a technical qualification test. Don t have the time or the person to devote to this training and qualification? We have a complete, annually-renewable support plan that includes on-site spare controller parts, on-site spare phones, all software updates, no-cost replacement of any failed component, and MXN technical support. It also includes twice-annual visits to inspect the system, update the firmware, reset the system clocks, and conduct additional training. It also includes 24 x 7 monitoring of all controllers, the network switches that the controllers are connected to, the PSTN connections, the applications server and the applications, and through the controllers all IP phones. In short, every part and process involved with the VoIP system. OK, let s assume that you now have a brand-new Mitel phone system. What does it take to run it? Very little, actually. None of our customers have ever added a VoIP system manager, and some of them run fairly large systems. Most of the ongoing operation of a phone system is keeping end user information up to date changing names, extensions, programming buttons to reflect individual tastes, and the like. The Mitel management environment that comes with every controller or virtualized controller can be sectioned out and controlled by login. This means that you can give the receptionist the additional duty of keeping the end user records up to date through a forms-based management environment. And that s about it, really. The system pretty much runs itself. Most of the other technical issues lie with the network, but you already have people who work on that. And sometimes the PRI or SIP trunks need checking and troubleshooting, which is mostly the responsibility of the local phone company. If you re using MXN support the monitoring system will tell us if something s not right with those connections, and you can contact the phone company for resolution. What does such a system cost? There s good news here. If you re a nonprofit organization there s a national contract at significant discounts for your use that makes a Mitel system the least expensive Tier One or Tier Two system on the market. And even if you re not a nonprofit, the pricing of the Mitel systems is very advantageous. How do you get a Mitel VoIP system? Just pick up the phone and leave us a message at (remember that you ll be calling over a SIP trunk, through a virtualized call control system and then out over an Internet connection). Or you can send a quick to sales@mxncorp.com and someone will get back with you. Or if you know your local MXN sales rep ring them up they ll be glad to hear from you.

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