Flux gate question

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now-1881/

train here.

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it shouldn't need new cable runs, there should have been excess capacity when the cable was installed.

The voip phones I've seen all had internal 10/100 switches, if you want to go faster you can't use the passthru socket you need a separate run to the switch.

If you have several phones in a room you can daisy-chain them and use wall-warts for power or put them on a local POE switch.

--
?? 100% natural

You mean they should have run two CAT-5 instead of one, just for the fun of it? No way, not in business. Ok, in my case I did but to run POTS over the other CAT-5. No way I'll let VoIP in here.

My POTS phones can just be ... plugged into an RJ-11 and that's it :-)

No wall warts, no PoE. Best thing is, they always work and there are never interruptions.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

That's how it should be. No reams of faceless data but at first just one li'l "Check System" lamp. When that's lit, a few graphs. When those still aren't enough, some more underlying data.

No, also aerospace people do because it saves lives there. Others should learn from them.

Well, if they don't want to deal with customer network issues they should either

a. write honest proposals that spell out that a whole new second network is required

or

b. get out of that business.

:-)

Then maybe that whole concept is no good for anything other than the infrastructire of large teclos (where it does make sense IMHO).

Meantime we just keep switching over to cell phones if the conference audio link goes on the fritz, like it usually does with VoIP.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Generally the jacks need to be run back to a PBX or something of that ilk, unless you only have one or two lines. That's the same work as running another set of CAT5.

PoE is better than regular phones because they generally need a wall wart each.

Unless you're still using those black rotary dial phones.

Not really. Unless the business building didn't have any upgrades in the last 100 years or so the phone lines will already be there. Same in homes. For example here I found to my surprise that five twitsted pairs went to just about any phone jack.

Then, you can run four phones over just one CAT-5. I my case several links are RF so no wires at all.

None of my corded phones needs a wall wart. Why should they?

Nope, Panasonic Easa-Phone. Those are for PBX systems up to 28 phones. We do have one of these in the kitchen though, except ours is a bit older:

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

[snip]

Of course not. I'm sure the crank works just fine >:-} ...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson, CTO | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at

| 1962 | I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.

But what about his phone?

Yeah! it's a lot more fun to run cat _before_ the drywall goes on.

VOIP doesn't have to be unreliable.

--
?? 100% natural

You can run enough data to run 30 voip phones over two cat5 pairs.

--
?? 100% natural

But you cannot tap into that string willy-nilly fashion along its course, and that's one of the problem, requiring some new infrastructure. With POTS you can tap in anywhere.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

The guys who built the place here were very modern for 1970 but not quite this modern. Plus they could not even buy CAT-5 back then.

True, as evidenced by telcos in their infracstructure which uses VoIP, often without their customers knowing it. But in deployments at customer premises my impression is that even "professional" VoIP systems are to a large extent plain unreliable when it comes to drop-outs and such.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Close. The graphs get generated continuously, whether you need them or not. The past history is what's important. One should be able to look at the graphs, and instantly tell that something has changed. No waiting for the alarm in order to start graphing. That's the way all the network monitoring software works, including the VoIP stuff. As for the "Check System" light, don't bother. It will be lit continuously as errors and glitches are chronic.

Aerospace responds to alarms and alerts because failures tend to be catastrophic. Even so, such alarms and alerts are of marginal value. For example, there were some warnings prior the space shuttle Challenger falling apart on re-entry, but nobody could interpret their meaning. Same with various airline accidents, where something went wrong, the alarm goes off, but nobody knows what it means, much less what to do. My favorite was a private plane that did a wheels up landing while the tower was yelling over the radio at the pilot to abort the landing. When asked why he didn't respond to the tower's warning, he indicated that he couldn't hear the radio over the alarm buzzer. Plenty of other dumb stories of alarms that were ignored.

Rewind please. It was you that suggested that they were hundreds of miles away and too busy to deal with such trivial customer complaints. Since I'm effectively doing much the same thing for my customers, I have a little experience in how it works. It is impossible to respond to every complaint, especially automated alarms and automated trouble ticket spam generators. Even worse are customers that don't want to bother their service providers with issues that they really don't understand and usually can't explain in detail. I had one piece of software that I helped produce, that shipped about 2000 copies before anyone bothered to mention that it didn't run.

Anyway, what works best is to have a single point of contact with the customer, so that the service company is not getting conflicting guesses. Remote admin and logging is mandatory. Outsourcing the switching, intercom, voice mail, etc to offsite saves considerable effort (at the expense of additional internet bandwidth). Redundancy and fail-over solves many reliability problems but increases costs.

The most difficult part is finding someone who can decode the complaint, make an intelligent assessment as to its severity, and dispatch someone with the appropriate tools to actually fix the problem. In my limited experience with VoIP, that's incredibly difficult bordering on impossible. It's not that they don't want to deal with the customers issues, they simply don't know what needs fixing.

Yeah, that works. I think I've spent more time dealing with the issues of having a hot standby system, VLAN's, fail-over, etc than with single stand alone systems. Redundancy is not easy. Incidentally, only the largest systems have separate CAT5 for the VoIP system. Most use the same wiring as the computers, but use a VLAN to separate the traffic.

Believe me, I really don't want to do VoIP. It's way too much work and involves far too many unrealistic expectations for the customer. However, literally all of my business office customers want and use VoIP. All I insist is that they have one POTS line handy not for failures, but so I can take the system down without killing all the incoming phone services (and talk to the VoIP service provider tech support while trying to fix their latest screwups).

Nope. The concept is good, but the implementation is lacking. Lots of reasons. I can detail if anyone is interested.

It's nice to have a fallback, but as I previously suggested, there may be something wrong with the way this particular VoIP system works. Except for my own office (long story here), all of my VoIP systems work well thanks to QoS and adequate reserved bandwidth for the number of instruments.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

The "Check System" light needs to be a little smarter than that. Like in cars where it won't light if there is the occasional misfire in the engine. But it will be lit if this happens a lot or if there are several misfires in a row. IOW the light does take history into account.

They are most definitely not of marginal value. They can save lives. Think about the stall warning or an engine imbalance warning. These warning lights can mean the difference between a safe emergency landing and a sad story in the evening news.

A properly trained pilot knows what each alarm means, plus there is the handbook. There are sometimes situations, like on the Challenger, where there isn't all that much you can do to avoid a disaster. But very often there is.

So he landed with the alarm buzzer and didn't even bother to check the landing gear locking lights? That would be the perfect example of serious human error. No alert light can avoid that.

No, I said the clients are hundreds of miles away so I can't do anything about it. What we do to fix it is that they switch from VoIP to their cell phones.

Agreed, and they all have service contracts et cetera in place. But the reality is that these VoIP systems too often do not live up to the same quality standards as older PBX systems.

Then maybe they should go back to PBX because that's not as complicated and can be handled by a local telco service technician :-)

The ones I have personally seen were of the 2nd category. But the traffic separation either isn't all that successful or there's other issues. Fact is, calls nearly always go through but then chunks of the conversation (mostly from their side) vanish. Sometimes to the point where whole sentences become unintelligible. The VoIP party often won't know unless a caller tells them. Then it's usually "Oh, dang, again?".

It was similar with cell networks in the 90's. There were times when I had to ask a caller to please stop at the next phone booth and call on a landline. Now they are better, but not all of them.

On one system we went as far as having a dedicated cell link from the rooftop.

I don't doubt that. After all, the telcos successfully use VoIP. But it's dedicated lines, usually. I only see this from a business perspective and from that view point a system is only good if there is enough success in general implementations. With VoIP that just isn't the case.

And nearly all others :-(

That is great. But unfortunately there are a lot of other VoIP networks out there that I'd consider unreliable. It is very similar with web conferencing services. There are some that work flawlessly every single time. Then there are some (big ones) that notoriously fails and have poorly designed support software.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

THe VOIP phones here at work are on the same cable as our laptops. The PC plugs into the phone. It works fine. What doesn't isn't the fault of VOIP or the network hardware.

Even POTS in homes is run in a star now. It's easier.

Well, our home is from 1970, so ...

But the new runs I did are all home-run style to a central wire closet, of course.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

That seems to be the convention around here... all new construction has a central wiring closet for POTS, CATV and CAT5+ ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Soon I'll have to do another coax plus CAT-5 run. Closet, umpteen feet of crawl space, up to where the lab bench is. Not looking forward to that job, one never knows who else lives down there.

Quote "About the rattle snakes in crawl spaces,i lay there real still untile they slitther away then i get the hell out. The boa was a different story & didn`t wait around to say hi". ... Yikes, that wouldn't be a job for me.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/