Building your own voice lab

Over the past few months I've been following building voice labs out and how much they cost. What I've noticed is that the price of 2821's have come down from 600 dollars to buy it now for 220. With them being that low, I feel most people can at least get started with buying 1 2821 and 1 cheaper 3725 for a PSTN Frame relay. I've saw 2 port VWIC cards for 43 dollars, and I've also seen 3550 for 90 dollars. I think now is the time to get a voice lab together that can at least get you through CCNP V. I'm not sure what the new CCIE V will require. But if it doesn't' go over 15.2 you should be fine. If it does require over 15.2 you may have to do rack rentals or purchase more expensive devices. But I'm thinking now for less than 3K you can get a killer lab and it will more than pay for itself in a year if you use it.

2821= 225
7961= 60
3550= 99
3725= 90
VWICS=40

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Legacy User

For whatever reason 2821's have been dropping while the 2811's are holding there value. But good post nonetheless.

shodown

dmarcisco wrote: »

For whatever reason 2821's have been dropping while the 2811's are holding there value. But good post nonetheless.

Yeah and I don't see a lot of enterprises running to 15.2 at the moment or even if they are they aren't using the 15.2 features like the new RSVP and so on. So over the next few months I'm planning on getting 8-10 2821's. That will cover a lot of design work I got coming up

Legacy User

8-10 2821s Are you planning to run all of those at home? The whole heat factor turns me off to getting a huge lab. On a side note do you feel most SMB's are going the hosted voip route instead of shelling out the bucks for the cucm suite.

shodown

They will be in my basement, so heat won't be a factor for me as even in the dog days of summer its pretty cool down there, plus I can always put a window unit A/C in there. I doubt I will have all 10 at 1 time. But I do want to build out some 2-4 cluster systems eventually.

As for hosted voip. Its going to get bigger and bigger, as the cost comes down it only makes since. Even some large enterprises will go the hosted route. Even then I see a lot of engineering work no matter which way a company chooses.

Legacy User

But if the companies are going the hosted route will specializing in cucm suite be worth it at that point?

shodown

yeah companies are going to go hosted, but not all of them. When I worked for my last partner we had several customers who had hosted service and came to us, we even had a customer who was kicked off hosted services because they brought it down several times when they had all hands company meetings. Specializing in CUCM is still going to be a good path. Things may change as you need to use LYNC or avaya or Cisco, but the work has to be manned by geeks somewhere, hosted, cloud doesn't' mean the work disappears, it just changes who's doing it. If you are good with dial plan designs, H323, SIP and so on, there will be work for you to do.

Rakurai

Great.... are we gonna get in bidding wars for 2821's now?

shodown

Rakurai wrote: »

Great.... are we gonna get in bidding wars for 2821's now?

THere are plenty of them for all us.