How This Book Is Organized


This book is organized in a logical, step-by-step approach to building a comprehensive understanding of VoIP. That approach is demonstrated in the following outline of the chapters:

  • Chapter 1, "Touring the History Museum of Telephony"Reviews the function and purpose of public switched telephone network (PSTN), PBX, and key system telephony networks. The chapter covers topics such as supervisory signaling, alert signaling, and address signaling. Near the end of Chapter 1, a case study is introduced. The scenario introduced in the case study is revisited and expanded upon in future chapters.

  • Chapter 2, "Making Waves: Turning Your Voice into Zeros and Ones"Explains how the human voice can be converted into a series of ones and zeros, and how bandwidth can be preserved on the Wide Area Network (WAN) by compressing voice traffic.

  • Chapter 3, "Paving the Pathway to a Voice over IP Network"Builds on the legacy telephony concepts established in Chapter 1, as well as the theory of digitizing voice covered in Chapter 2, by introducing the reader to an initial migration step away from traditional telephony systems, which involves sending calls across a WAN instead of the PSTN.

  • Chapter 4, "Meet the 'Brain' of the Voice over IP Network"Introduces you to the world of IP telephony, focusing on Cisco CallManager (CCM) solutions. Current CCM 4.x features (for example, security and video) are discussed.

  • Chapter 5, "Speaking the Gateways' Languages"Expands the IP telephony solution beyond a single "cluster" to the rest of the world via gateways. Gateway protocols (for example, H.323, MGCP, and SIP) are discussed as the potential gateway protocols of choice.

  • Chapter 6, "Why Quality Matters"Addresses quality of service (QoS) issues in a VoIP network. Some designers make the mistake of simply superimposing voice traffic on a data network. However, voice traffic needs high priority and has little tolerance for delay. Therefore, this chapter introduces a plethora of QoS technologies for treating special traffic (for example, voice) in a special way.

  • Chapter 7, "VoIP Supporting Roles"Introduces you to optional, value-added IP telephony components, such as Cisco Unity, which provides a unified messaging solution. Conferencing and contact center applications are also discussed.

  • Appendix A, "Answers to Chapter Review Questions"Each chapter ends with a "Chapter Review Questions" section. This appendix repeats the questions and lists answers as well.

  • Appendix B, "Next Steps: Where Do I Go From Here?"While this book introduces you to the theory surrounding VoIP, many readers might want to take the next step: learning how to configure VoIP equipment. This appendix recommends Cisco Press books and courses offered by Cisco Learning Partners that lead not only to a further understanding of VoIP, but also to Cisco certifications.

  • GlossaryThe world of VoIP requires its citizens to use often confusing lingo. This appendix gives clear and concise definitions for the most important terms introduced in the book.




Voice over IP First-Step
Voice over IP First-Step
ISBN: 1587201569
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 138
Authors: Kevin Wallace

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