Hi Arthur, regarding your questions:

My company has made various UC500/CME deployments where teleworker/remote phones registration was a must. We have simulated this kind of deployment using UC500, just for testing purposes and our conclusions are following:

- UC500 does not support survival in case the VPN goes down, so we don´t think this model is suitable for a deployment where there are no more than 4 or 5 teleworkers, and when voice services are not mission critical (if is there any). We completed a test using four g711 phones over VPN and was quite successful although.

- DSP resource resources are very limited in UC500 hardware, so if you are planning to save bandwith using g729 in offsite phones,hardware transcoding is something to think about quite carefully, this is completelly different when DSP modules are installed on a ISR, we actually have one deployment where there are about 15 teleworkers using the g729 codec hardware assisted and we did not have mayor issues so far, voice quality is flawless but this CME is running on a 2911 ISR2.

- Bandwith planning combined with traffic shapping is a must in these deployments, we always take extremely care of upstream bandwith, it depends on the way you connect to the main site, we use DMVPN mostly and for that using g711 we always asume a 90 kbps use per call and 24 kbps for g279, crypto and other heathers increase the bandwith requirements in 16 kbps at least. Traffic shapping is to us as critical as ra eliable VPN connection, no shapping means creepy sound and call drops, jitter and unsatisfied customers.

- We have not tested voice over SSL yet, and we don´t have plans to sell this kind of deployments by now, in our opinion it doesn´t seem as reliable as a VPN conection handled by a router is, specially regarding traffic shapping.

Hope our toughts can help you Arthur.

Hi Arthur,

- What is the largest "traditional teleworker" deployment you have done?

Currently 17 remote teleworkers, looking to expand that to 20

- What bandwidth planning process do you go through when thinking
per-phone (assumign G711)

I dont assume G-711, it is just not practical with bandwidth limitations so G-729 is the first choice, 711 is only considered where quality is of big issue.

- Thoughts on use 525G SSL connections instead of traditional
teleworker?  Worked?? How well?

Hmmm unable to make a comment on this as I have not even considered doing it, I am still a firm believer of an 857/877 at the teleworker site, by having those routers there we can program in failovers where more then one UC is in play.

and on a side note is there anyway to get Monitor / Watch type functions
 for buttons to work between UC500 / CME systems?  I am assuming not but
 I wanted to check with you all.

I am not aware of any sadly :(

I would love for something like this to be available, there could be but i am just not aware of it.

Right now one site the Teleworkers use the 7931 phones as they are talking to the one CME, so they can just monitor/watch and transfer between phones easily enough.

I hope you find the answers you are looking for, the UC-500 are quite handy at creating extra reach, but in doing so you do loose some localized functions..

Cheers,

David.