Apparently you can daisy chain IP phones to your computer. I assume the phone becomes the limiting factor in the ethernet connection speed? Can you buy gigabyte phones?
Haven’t seen a gigabyte ‘pass thru’ on a phone yet…but if you have a machine downstream of your phone that requires that much thruput, the last thing i would be wanting to do is stick an additional hub/switch in between. (which is essentially what is in the phone).
It seems kind of silly when you have gigabyte to the desktop… to decrease the bandwidth by a factor of ten… while increasing the utilization… whether you’re saturating the wire or not.
if you’re going to be using any kind of bandwidth intensive app on your desktop (while using your phone, that is), i would recommend against daisy-chaining your phone and computer.
we have polycom 501’s that will drop calls if any kind of significant network activity is present on the machine chained to it. thankfully we have four ports per cube to work with, so we can just activate another port.
not sure if this problem is prevalent on other brands of phones, but i would assume it’s something you’d have to watch for.
It’s unfortunate because (and I may be incorrect on some of these)…
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Our whole building would need rewired. All cat 3 for legacy system would need replaced with cat 5.
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I’m not sure that softphones provide the feature set that hardware phones have. ie… hands free intercom, zoned paging.
IIRC Cat3 is suitable for speeds up to 10Mb … so you could maybe try it ??
Most is not all of it is wired with single pair.
that won’t be Cat3 then.
you could consider using a channel bank and analogue phones, but then you’ll be hankering after the functionality a good VoIP hardphone is going to offer.
i would go with the rewire personally. i installed a site recently that only had 1 Cat5 point in each office (even if there were 6 people/PCs in there) … after some network anaysis i rewired some of it, installed PoE switches with uplink in some, phones with passthru used in the rest. they all seem to work ok.
Actually I like the softphone idea the best. I don’t have enough experience with them to say whether or not they will be reliable or have the features we need though.