Nortel PBX to Cisco IPT

jcsmith96 · ‎10-09-2008

What is the perferred or best method to connect a Nortel PBX to an Existing Cisco IPT cluster. I know we can use PRI's to the VGW's, but is there a way connect to the GK or use ICT via Nortel IP function?

gogasca · ‎10-09-2008

It may depend the geographical location of exiting networks, I would go for the PRIs if you have existing infraestructure

Eugene Cheng · ‎10-09-2008

My two cents is that using a PRI QSIG may be better as it is more commonly used and has been well documented. Using other methods may cause you to have issues such as lost caller IDs, display names, etc.

:)

Eugene

jcsmith96 · ‎10-09-2008

How about connecting using SIP

Sushil Kumar Katre · ‎10-09-2008

Hi James,

Integrating using QSIG and SIP are both feasible.

However the selection depends on the availability of these functionality on the Nortel box.

If these features are available as licenses you need to check if the Nortel box is already having these licenses or you need to invest on the licensing. Currently we were working on one of the integrations with Nortel where we found that customer was required to make investment for QSIG functionality and we finally selected Euro ISDN to do the integration, with very limited feature support.

QSIG, as mentioned in earlier posts is tried and tested integration mechanism. providing support for more features as compared to SIP. But required E1/T1 interfaces on both Cisco and Nortel side.

Please refer to the following integration guides from Cisco on SIP and QSIG integration and check the feature limitation with both the integration mechanism -

SIP - http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/voice_ip_comm/cucme/pbx/interop/notes/616799nt.pdf

QSIG - http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/voice_ip_comm/cucme/pbx/interop/notes/606763nt.pdf

Here's the list of things you should consider -

1) Availability of QSIG or SIP functionality on Nortel Box

2) Availability of Interfaces on Nortel and Cisco

3) Feature requirement, which you can classify as must have and good to have and then refer to the integration guides to check which mechanism would be appropriate.

-> Sushil