mgcp vs h323

[Jason Gervia]

Hello Everyone!

We are currently upgrading from CUCM 6.x to 8.6.  One of the discussion points has been upgrading our voice gateways (about 200+ of them) from mgcp to h323.  I'm a little leery of this given having to manually configure router patterns on each h323 gateway vs doing them on call manager.

Are large voice deployments using mgcp vs h323 for the gateways?  If so, can you give good reasons why?

Thanks in advance,

--Jason

[Jaime Valencia]

Have you reviewed this doc?

MGCP and H.323 Voice Gateway Protocol Comparison

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/partner/tech/tk1077/technologies_tech_note09186a00806fedbe.shtml

IMO it really depends on what capabilities you need

It you want less administration overhead MGCP is the option, but if you want enhanced routing capabilities and the ability to modify/reject calls on the GW then you need H323.

HTH

java

If this helps, please rate

www.cisco.com/go/pdihelpdesk

[Jason Gervia]

I guess what I'm really interested in is managing a large amount of gateways using either protocol - if there are any differences that would lead me one way vs another if you had a large amount of gateways and a small amount of people to manage them.

--Jason

[Marwan ALshawi]

Hi Jason,

there are some difrences between the two protocol and it is based on you needs and the environment you can chose one over the other

for example H323 provide you with more options in gigit manipulations on the GW level and  handling factional PRI

but the admin work is more becuase the conifgs are on per gateway

on the other hand

MGCP is more about centralized management where all the admin is on the call manager side

if you are using 8.5 and later you can even do call routing based on the calling number in callmanager side ( which used to be limitation of CUCM/MGCP )

but MGCP is not the right choice if you have fractional PRI with more than 5 gateways ( you can research on this point )

other than this for MGCP better for many remote voice gateway from manageability point of view

hope this help

pls rate the helpful posts

[Chris Deren]

With over 200 GWs I would definitely go with either H323 or SIP as backhualing MGCP to CUCM can add significant bandwidth requirements for 200+ sites on the central location.

As far as management I feel it's really the same amount of management, as with MGCP you need to drill down through menus on CUCM and H323 you simply adjust configuration on the GW, and once you really deploy the GW there is no much you would need to have to do to either.

H323 is a also a lot more robust with significantly less issues, just search this forum for all the MGCP issues folks experience, it supports more features, i.e. partial PRIs, NFAS, etc, there is no dependency on IOS version/CUCM version.

HTH,

Chris