Sensible Solution for Small Satellite-linked Offices

Hans Johnson · ‎04-18-2010

Hello,

I am in the process of developing a network to integrate roughly 90 working ships with their headquarters. The goal is for each vessel to be essentially a small branch office, with 4 digit dialing to headquarters and the like.

On each vessel will be a 2900 series router, along with 2 to 3 IP phones plus one or two analog rugged phones for crew use, connected to an FXS card in the router. Connectivity to the outside world will be via a private satellite network, so there will be about 550ms delay over the link.

My question is whether I should just link the phones (and FXS ports) back to a Call Manager back at our teleport, or make each ship-board router a CME, and have that link back to a master system in the teleport. There will likely be little to no calling between phones on the vessel, and little vessel-to-vessel calling.

Thanks,

Hans

David Hailey · ‎04-18-2010

Hans,

There may be some naysayers that come in and disagree with me and that's fine as there are a lot of smart engineers here but this is almost a case of "six in one hand, half dozen in the other"; however, the one thing that is going to be sticky is the 550ms latency on the satellite link. So, with that said up front - I would likely do each router as a CME router. This would at least keep the TFTP, call control, and SCCP traffic local to each ship. In other words, you won't have phones trying to register over satellite and then also have to accomodate the RTP streams over the same links as well. So, if you can keep a fair amount of traffic local (i.e., on-ship) then you'll just have ICT traffic from the CME routers and ultimately RTP traffic from ships to the teleport. I'm assuming that most of your calls will be ship to teleport or ship to PSTN which would ultimately take an ICT path back to your HQ system and then out a gateway from there.

My 2 cents.

Hailey

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