
Chapter 1 Introduction 23
IP Telephony Configuration Guide
WAN
A Wide Area Network (WAN) is a communications network that covers a wide geographic area,
such as state or country. For Business Communications Manager, a WAN is any IP network
connected to a WAN card on the Business Communications Manager system. This may also be a
direct connection to another Business Communications Manager system.
LAN
A Local Area Network (LAN) is a communications network that serves users within a confined
geographical area. For Business Communications Manager, a LAN is any IP network connected to
a LAN card on the Business Communications Manager system. Often, the LAN can include a
router that forms a connection to the Internet.
Public Switched Telephone Network
The Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) can play an import role in IP Telephony
communications. In many installations, the PSTN forms a fallback route, so that if a call across a
VoIP trunk does not have adequate voice quality, the call is routed across the PSTN instead. The
Business Communications Manager also serves as a gateway to the PSTN for users on the system.
Key IP Telephony Concepts
In traditional telephony, the voice path between two telephones is circuit switched. This means
that the analog or digital connection between the two telephones is dedicated to the call. The voice
quality is usually excellent, since there is no other signal to interfere.
In IP telephony, voice quality between IP telephones can vary significantly from call to call and
time of day. When two IP telephones are on a call, each IP telephone encodes the speech at the
handset microphone into small data packets called frames, and sends the frames across the IP
network to the other telephone where the frames are decoded and played at the handset receiver. If
some of the frames get lost while in transit, or are delayed too long, the receiving telephone
experiences poor voice quality.
Codecs
The algorithm used to compress and decompress voice is embedded in a software entity called a
codec (COde-DECode).
Two popular Codecs are G.711 and G.729. The G.711 Codec samples voice at 64 kilobits per
second (kbps) while G.729 samples at a far lower rate of 8 kbps.
Voice quality is better when using a G.711 CODEC, but more network bandwidth is used to
exchange the voice frames between the telephones.
If you experience poor voice quality and suspect it is due to heavy network traffic, you can get
better voice quality by configuring the IP telephone to use a G.729 CODEC.
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