I’m trying to get people’s experiences with their consultants/VARs in recent traditional voice to VOIP implementations. This is with respect to how the VAR treats the network portion of it. Did your VAR include assessing the network and helping with QOS/wireless readiness or did they leave that ball in your court and only worry about deploying the phones and servers?
We just moved from a traditional to a VOIP system on our campus. This is my first experience with a full VOIP implementation. I implemented the QOS no problem and all the wired phones are fine. We are having issues with the wireless phones and are in “negotiations” with the VAR on who should get it working. Before this all began, we were worried about the wireless coverage and we had this same VAR perform a wireless site survey at extra cost to assess the wireless network with an eye towards wireless VOIP. As a result we installed the recommended access points to make sure we have decent 5 GHz coverage.
The VAR’s attitude has been that they’re responsible for the phones and the CUCM servers and anything on the network is ours. However they did mention a voice readiness assessment and user acceptance testing in their SOW, neither of which they did. My thinking is that this is a VAR that has always been primarily focused on voice and they do not want to deal with networking even though they’re now deploying VOIP.
So what has been your experience? Does the VAR normally take the network into account when deploying VOIP or do they just stick to the voice components and leave the network up to you?
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