teleworker connectivity challenge

terryabbott · ‎08-17-2007

I have a large number of teleworkers that currently are using local phone numbers into their home offices. These lines have the distinctive ring feature for faxes and use analog phones. The users want to keep their local lines, distinctive ring and faxes yet go to IP Telephony using the 7941G phone connected to the main corporate system. I've been looking at the 2800 series router as it can do VPN and voice gateway services. For distinctive ring I have to add a third party device. The problem is, this is expensive times hundreds of people. As a second thought, I was thinking of a VPN router and a separate voice gateway from Multitech.

I'd appreciate and ideas, comments, warnings or experiences with this type of problem.

Thanks

Terry

Jason Aarons · ‎08-20-2007

The Cisco Teleworker SRDN discusses Cisco 8xx VPN routers.

Long term I'd be courious to hear about ROI. Do you end up spending more labor hours troubleshooting issues like home wiring, DSL, NAT, home networks, home computers, more helpdesk,

arcaidy76 · ‎08-20-2007

The 800 series routers will work fine for everything except telephony. You'll need to go with the 2800's like you said with Cisco.

I couple years ago I set up 15 or so people to work remotely. Some were ACD agents who took numerous calls each day. Had a mix and match of Cable and DSL and one on ISDN. It was actually pretty stable and reliable. We required the Cisco router be plugged directly in to the service provider and since the company was paying for the internet, didn't officially allow any home/person traffic to go across the link. We disabled split tunnelling so we could control all the traffic with in and out of the device for the best QOS. You still had no control over the ISP, but these guys usually worked during the least congested times.

We used 8xx's with easyVPN configured. The configurations were a mirror of each other except for account info and IP's so it was easy to manage.

As part of the SLA we made it very clear we had no control over the service provider and in case the problem was caused by the ISP it was the users who had to work with them to resolve the issue. We made management sign off on this as well.

As part of the predeployment we have the userd do a set of ping to the VPN server to test response times and loss. This showed we did some testing before the department purchased the equipment only to find it wouldn't work well.

Out biggest issues were from DSL providers not allowing advertised up stream bandwidth. In most cases this was resolved by knocking it down to 729 and giving voice and call control all bandwidth.

Over all it worked really well for us and I would not have a problem putting it in somewhere else. I'd highly suggest writing a detailed SLA and set firm expectations.

More of experience than technical help... but you asked for both. =)