asterisk users - Jan 2010 - 10/100 voip phones and gigabit connection

hi all,

just subscribed to the list and first mail, nice to be here.

Hopefully i'm in the right place for this question since i'm planning a 
little VOIP implementation at the moment and ran in to something while 
going through the shopping list.

i noticed that a lot of VOIP phones have a double network interface 
allowing you to use only 1 LAN cable for both the phone and your 
desktop, a really nice feature that can save a lot of cable, but most 
are 10/100 connections while i have a gigabit network. Off course there 
are phones available with a Gigabit connection but these are at least 3 
to 4 times as expensive.

another option would be to have both desktop and voip phone each a 
dedicated line ( basically having 2 seperate networks ), already have 
these in place from the old/current situation but i was hoping to clear 
some cables.

does anybody know of another solution to this or is my conclusion above 
simply all the choice there is?

Much obliged,

Randall

On 01/15/10 17:54, randall wrote:
> hi all,
>
> i noticed that a lot of VOIP phones have a double network interface 
> allowing you to use only 1 LAN cable for both the phone and your 
> desktop, a really nice feature that can save a lot of cable, but most 
> are 10/100 connections while i have a gigabit network. Off course there 
> are phones available with a Gigabit connection but these are at least 3 
> to 4 times as expensive.
>
> another option would be to have both desktop and voip phone each a 
> dedicated line ( basically having 2 seperate networks ), already have 
> these in place from the old/current situation but i was hoping to clear 
> some cables.
>
> does anybody know of another solution to this or is my conclusion above 
> simply all the choice there is?
>
>   
You've hit the nail on the head.  A VoIP phone with two network ports is
probably best thought of as a two port switch.  Like any switch, if you
connect a gigabit NIC to a 10/100 switch, you'll end up with a 100
megabit connection.  The only way to get a gigabit connection to your PC
is via a phone that has gigabit ports, or have a separate cable back to
the switch.

Best practice is usually to segregate phone and PC networks anyway - it
helps avoid degradation of VoIP quality when the LAN becomes heavily loaded.

----- Original Message ----- 
  From: randall 
  To: asterisk-users at lists.digium.com 
  Sent: Friday, January 15, 2010 7:54 AM
  Subject: [asterisk-users] 10/100 voip phones and gigabit connection


  hi all,

  just subscribed to the list and first mail, nice to be here.

  Hopefully i'm in the right place for this question since i'm planning
a
  little VOIP implementation at the moment and ran in to something while 
  going through the shopping list.

  i noticed that a lot of VOIP phones have a double network interface 
  allowing you to use only 1 LAN cable for both the phone and your 
  desktop, a really nice feature that can save a lot of cable, but most 
  are 10/100 connections while i have a gigabit network. Off course there 
  are phones available with a Gigabit connection but these are at least 3 
  to 4 times as expensive.

In a pinch, the cheapest 1Gbit switch I could find is 17 Eur with 5 ports.

Leif

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-users/attachments/20100115/1f7df14f/attachment.htm

On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 1:54 AM, randall <randall at songshu.org>
wrote:
> does anybody know of another solution to this or is my conclusion above
> simply all the choice there is?
So let me get this straight.

You're planning on buying multiple Gigabit, PoE switches, and you're
quibbling over the price of running parallel data cable? The gigabit
PoE switches are not cheap, at least if you're buying enterprise
switches that actually deliver real gigabit, with full cross-sectional
bandwidth. The cable isn't very much money, and if you double-wire
now, you're ready when you have twice as many employees in the same
space.

Next, you don't say what this office is like, but I'm going to let you
in on a little secret. Most people in an office rarely spike to a full
100Mbit connection. Do some bandwidth monitoring on your network and
you'll discover that. A gigabit ethernet phone is a nice thing to
have, but it's more a marketing thing than an actual necessity.
Anybody that can afford a gigabit ethernet switching phone and true
gigabit ethernet PoE backend can afford a second wire to every desk.

Please let me know the use case if you find people can't be happy with
a 100Mbit connection for the typical Windoze office environment.