In my Voice over IP and IP Telephony tips, I'm always looking for good technical resources in this topic area. Recently, a reader e-mailed me to ask my opinion on Voice over IP Calculator, a site that aims to support engineers and technicians faced with
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making technical VoIP decisions. The Web is greater than the sum of its myriad parts, and I'm just one guy looking for a clue, so I hope it comes as no surprise that the inquiry spurred my first visit to this site. I'm grateful for the pointer, though, because I liked much of what I found there.
Here's a short list of some of the goodies you can dig up there:
- A collection of free VoIP calculators that includes a lines and IP bandwidth calculator, an Erlangs and bandwidth calculator, a minutes and lines calculator, and an Erlangs and lines calculator. All should come in handy when trying to figure out how many lines and how much bandwidth is required for VoIP deployment.
- A variety of for-a-fee VoIP analysis products, ranging from $59 to $2999 depending on products selected and licensing scope.
- Two options for IP Telephony services (see the heading "Internet Telephony" on the home page).
- Two different online discussion groups, one on VoIP the other on network convergence (ditto previous item).
- A nice VoIP directory that covers all kinds of related topics, including hardware, info resources, professional services, service providers, software, and standards bodies.
You'll also find pointers to various technical papers and some VoIP books here as well. If you're looking for a good, vendor-agnostic (vendors do sponsor but don't overwhelm this) site, it's definitely worth a visit. Check it out!
Ed Tittel is a regular contributor to numerous TechTarget Web sites, and the author of over 100 books on a wide range of computing subjects from markup languages to information security. He's also a contributing editor for Certification Magazine, and edits Que Publising's Exam Cram 2 series of cert prep books. E-mail Ed at etittel@techtarget.com.
This was first published in June 2004