setup voip on ea6500

[menco1]

Just scored a load of Cisco and polycom VoIP phones and conference units. How can I test and use these on my home network using my Cisco ea6500 router? Can anyone point to a step-by-step guide hopefully using freeware?

 

[bill001g]

It depends a lot on what you have. They make many versions of similar hardware. First you must ensure they are actually VoIP many of the units use a special cabling that only works on certain brands of PBX.

Now even if you have VoIP some of these only work on certain systems. They are dependent on a central manager that uses proprietary protocols. Many times they load the software from this platform and will not work unless you are paying a license.

So lets assume you have true VoIP designed to work on a open system. There are 2 common VoIP platforms one runs H323 and the other runs SIP. The phones can not be mixed.

So now that we get this far you have not even started.

You need to get what cisco describes as a "call manager". What this is a server that talks to all the end phones and does all the call setup. This the device that tells the phone when you dial 1234 you need to connect to ip address x.x.x.x There are some basic free software that will do this but it is hard to say how compatible the phones you have are. You may have to setup lots more stuff. Many phones are dependent on DHCP for their configurations that they load from the network. Also many of these phones are PoE so may also need PoE switches or injectors.

Pretty much the router you have will do nothing in relation to the phones.