The Seven Most Common Mistakes of IP Telephony Deployment — and How to Short-Circuit Them

After years in the field implementing hundreds of IP telephony systems, Norm Jones has seen all kinds of unusual situations as organizations of all sizes make the switch to converged voice/data networks. An implementation services project manager at ShoreTel, Jones shares the seven most common deployment mistakes he’s seen on the job.

1. Skipping network assessments. “A thorough network assessment is critical for multi-site deployments of IP telephony, and even for single sites,” Jones says. Tests assessing network latency, packet loss and jitter are conducted with software agents that simulate voice traffic being transmitted across a legacy data network.

Thorough network assessments analyze traffic over a matter of days, gathering data points that help customers judge the readiness of their network to handle the impending surge of real-time voice traffic. Point-in-time assessments measure only the network’s behavior at a single moment—and thus are apt to miss sporadic capacity shortages that take place during scheduled network replications or bulk-file transfers, for example.

Performing a network assessment isn’t just a best practice. When it comes to deploying ShoreTel’s Pure IP Unified Communications solution a customer must conduct a network assessment before deployment as a part of ShoreTel’s corporate policy. If the customer conducts the assessment internally with its own staff, its officials must sign a network-assessment waiver before ShoreTel can proceed with the implementation. Learn more about ShoreTel network assessments.

2. Omitting site surveys. Another up-front consideration is a site survey, which entails the mundane but necessary work of looking at exactly what equipment is in use around the site. “Customers don’t always spend the time looking under everyone’s desk to see if they have an Ethernet hub there,” Jones observes. “Then all of a sudden you learn that they don’t have dedicated cabling to the desktop or you find an area where they put in an inexpensive hub or an unmanaged switch that is feeding a bunch of printers.” Most installations have a Power over Ethernet switch which provides power to the IP phone. If there is a hub or switch under the desk or in a small closet, the power will not make it to the phone. While it may seem time-consuming to make that walk-through for the site survey, it helps IT understand the exact terrain that will be rolled over to IP telephony.

3. Staying in the dark about trunks. The IT staff may not be in regular enough communications with carriers to know whether ground-start or loop-start trunks (a.k.a. Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS)) are in use in the organization’s telco network. “Ground-start trunks are often from the legacy days, but if you have ground-start into your PBX, when you attempt to cut over the lines to the IP telephony system, you won’t get any dial tone since it is not supported.” Carriers can make the change for you to convert to loop-start trunks, but expect up to a month’s delay as they do so, cautions Jones.

4. Not knowing other key circuitry details. Get all the information you can from your carrier as you prepare to cut over—such as confirming that the D channel is on the 24th channel when you order a new PRI. “In some instances, the D channel is on some other channel, and this is something that is not changeable on our side,” says Jones. ShoreTel implementation staff will also need to know the type of CO switch in use, and how many digits (four, five, seven or ten) the carrier will be sending. “We recommend that it matches the extension length of the end-user at the company site or sites,”Jones says.

5. Sticking with old client operating systems. “Some people are shocked we don’t support Microsoft Windows 2000 anymore,” Jones says. “We would hope everyone has Microsoft Windows XP by now, but that’s not always the case.” However, earlier versions of ShoreTel software, including 6.1, do support Windows 2000, while upgrades to ShoreTel 7.0 are free and can be quickly handled by administrators. “The best step here is to communicate the desktop requirements with your solution provider before the project starts.”

6. Not including training. Adequate training—of administrative staff who may be adding new employees into the phone system, supervisors who will be running both real-time and historical usage reports, and other types of users who will use the phones in the office and on the road—is too often overlooked, Jones says. It’s not hugely time-consuming to teach people how to use the ShoreTel system; perhaps one to two hours are required to teach most employees the functions relevant to their roles within the organization. But those hours can make a huge difference in terms of your organization’s ability to get the most out of its IP telephony deployment.

7. Cutting over on a Friday night. Many organizations first consider a weekend as the ideal time period in which they will make the switch to IP telephony, but Jones advocates a mid-week schedule for several reasons. “For one thing, you want to slate your training for the day prior to cutover,” so it’s fresh in people’s minds and they can put into practice on Thursday what they learned on Wednesday. Also, ShoreTel services or your solution provider can be on site on the go-live day to solve problems and review procedures as end users get accustomed to their new phone system. Having on-site support from your reseller or ShoreTel may also come in handy to explain how to access corporate voicemail from outside or to review the auto-attendant menu once again with end users or to link up that lone overlooked fax machine.