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Designing a VoIP Network in a Multi-Floor Building

saeed.ayman
Level 1
Level 1

I work in a 13-floor building in my company.

Each floor carries about 65 employees.

I want to design a complete VoIP network, separated from the Data network (Please do not ask why).

I think all my need will be switches, but I want to know how it will be connected (a switch for each floor, distributing into another switches per floor for the capacity, etc.) and the types of switches.

Thanks a a lot.

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Joseph W. Doherty
Hall of Fame
Hall of Fame

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Well, for each floor you're going to need enough ports to support your VoIP jacks.  You'll probably want to be able to support, at least, PoE or PoE+.  For VoIP phones, even just a 10 Mbps connection will do the job, but likely you'll obtain a dual (10/100) or triple speed (10/100/1000) supporting switch.

For 65 ports, or so, you could use multiple 24 or 48 ports L2 switches, perhaps stackable switches.  (Stackables make the most sense if all same floor switches will be in the same closet.)

For runs between switches, same floor, or different floors, you'll want fiber capability.  Again, as VoIP phones only use about 100 K, a 100 Mbps fiber uplink would be enough but you'll probably end up with gig.

How you interconnect switches depends on multiple factors including whether you're supporting some form of redundancy.  For example, one design might be a pair of L3 switches with fiber ports, for the building, and each floor with a stack of L2 switches which have a pair of fiber links to the L3 switch stack.  The fiber pair would be configured as a port-channel.  Such a design, if a floor switch failed would only take down the VoIP hosts connected to it.  If one of the L3 switches failed, you would have no outage.

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