City polices voice traffic

Bobby Parish uses third-party tools to troubleshoot voice traffic on the Jacksonville, N.C., network

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For two years, Bobby Parish didn't worry too much about how his new Cisco-based converged voice/data network performed, mostly because it didn't cause any major problems. But when the wheels started to squeak, he started to worry.

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"We have a lot of bandwidth out there and didn't run into serious issues," says Parrish, senior IT specialist with the city of Jacksonville, N.C. "But at the same time, I knew we were unable to proactively negate problems or to plan for upgrades, while knowing voice performance wouldn't degrade."

Parrish says the need for management software slowly became apparent, as voice-call quality would falter from time to time, and he realized he had no way to troubleshoot the problems.

In 2002, Jacksonville overhauled its network and decided to run voice traffic over the data network, potentially "saving tons of money on the monthly phone bill."

"We were going to put in an infrastructure to interconnect all our buildings. The need for a new telephone system arose as well, so we decided it was just easier to put voice on top of that," Parrish says. "Plus our phone bills went from around $12,000 to $14,000 per month to around $3,000 to $4,000 per month, and that includes all of our T1 lines for [Private Rate Interfaces] and Internet access."

Parrish says the city chose Cisco as the network and voice vendor, installing Cisco Catalyst 6509, 4006, 4507 and 3500 series switches at various locations. The infrastructure supports about 400 users with 240 IP devices and telephones, including fire and police, as well as public service departments and recreational facilities.

He says the city's network is completely switched with routing out to the Internet, two locations connected via frame relay and 19 locations supported via Gigabit fiber connectivity, on which he installed the VoIP network. He also uses Cisco CallManager software, the call-processing component of the Cisco IP telephony products.