Better to use G.729 on Unity, or use transcoders for remote sites?

[gbrome]

I have a centralized CCM and Unity deployment. My remote sites use G.729 to communicate with the CCM and Unity to save BW. I have Unity set up to use both G.711 and G.729 codecs. My question is, it better to not allow G.729 on Unity and use HW transcoders that are on the same LAN as Unity, or is it better to allow Unity to use G.729 and not use the transcoders? I have seen several examples of each from Cisco. I have put the Voicemail ports in their own region and DP and make them use G.729 with the remote regions, and allow G7.11 and G.729 locally. If I allow G.729, the transcoders are never invoked, evidenced by monitoring the transcoder usage. Is it better to stick with one recording format, or does the degradation from transcoding offset any benefit? Thanks!

[yshraybman]

We have been using G.729 on Unity in both central office and remote office for over 4 years and never had any complaints about message quality. The good thing about G.729 is the .wav file is so much smaller than G.711 and if the subscriber is receiving a lot of messages using G.729 can save a lot of storage space.

[gbrome]

Thanks for responding! Your point about disk space is a good one. I do notice a difference in sound quality, between codecs however. What TSP version are you on? I am on TSP v.7.04.

[Chris Deren]

You do not need external transcoders for Unity. Unity build in software transcoders will do the job. It can accomandat several thousand of subscribers on single server.

Chris

[gbrome]

For now, I have less than a thousand, so I will use Unity's transcoders.

Thanks!