Voip phones

[Felix]

I am trying to plan ahead for new network infrastructure. I have various offices that only have 1 network port in the office which is currently used by the PC. We will be replacing our existing phone system to VOIP setup.

My question is, do bog standard Voip phones have passthrough for a PC or would I need higher spec ones. Also, are they able to handle VLAN tagging. If the single network port is tagged for both the voice VLAN and PC vlan traffic, will the PC get the correct VLAN?

 

[ZedPowered]

We currently have an Avaya IP500 that does exactly that. Separate VLAN for the VOIP and the phones are ethernet pass through to the PC. Works well for us with 70 on site and 10 VPN phones.

Edit for info, the desk phones are Avaya 1616 handsets. Rather basic but do the job.

 

[Hulkster]

What system are you looking at? It really depends on the system & model of phones.

In my experience, admittedly with the enterprise end of the scale, the phones always have 2 ports.

I've never come accross a phone that doesn't support tagging.

You dont tag the data vlan & the voice VLAN on the port. Generally the data vlan is untagged on the port (workstations don't generally do tagging anyway) and the voice vlan is tagged.

The phones typically have special DHCP options, which vary by vendor. In my experience, the DHCP option tells it what VLAN it should be on, so the phone then reboots and gets an IP on the correct VLAN.

The PC's don't do this and only stay on the untagged vlan on that port. They dont know or care about tags.

You will need Layer 3 switches or a router between switches.

You will also set up Data & Voice scops on the same DHCP server, and set up DHCP relay for the phones.

 

[Caged]

As above, except I haven't seen a phone get a VLAN tag via DHCP. In my experience LLDP / CDP sorts out what VLAN is for voice, or it's set manually into the handset when they are deployed.

Get gigabit handsets if you want gigabit to your desktops (you probably don't need it). Most handsets are 10/100.