Cisco IADs – A Great Voice Strategy
I was talking to a friend of mine over the holidays who installs for a large telco. His platform includes several Cisco IADs that are currently in service and mostly the IAD2430 series. From his install and working position, the IAD works great.
Cisco IADs take several channels of data, voice, or fax traffic from a user and mashes them into one stream over a single or multiple WAN uplink. Most applications that love this are voice-based. You could use it for straight data traffic, but it was built for VoIP or Voice over Asynchronous Transfer Mode (VoATM) protocols and excels there.
There are 4 common and easy to obtain options for the IAD2430 series:
— 8 port FXS – model IAD2431-8FXS
— 16 port FXS – model IAD2431-16FXS
— 24 port FXS – model IAD2432-24FXS
— T1/E1 – model IAD2431-1T1/E1
There are other IAD hardware options, however, they are not necessarily as easy to find or as useful.
In some cases, the IAD2430 series will be able to link to an existing patch panel in your telelcom network already. The IAD will rackmount or wallmount, and in either mounting way, please make sure it is grounded well.
If you have a large facility and need an aggregator to make the floors/sections of your building flow better, then this may be the item for you.
The popularity of VOIP telephone installs has soared over the last chunk of years, so installs of IADs have obviously been on the rise too. With a little planning, this device can become a mainstay in your voice network.