Specifications

Chapter 9 Catalyst DSP Provisioning
Catalyst Conferencing Services
9-4
Cisco IP Telephony Network Design Guide
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Catalyst Conferencing Services
To scale IP telephony systems in large enterprise environments, hardware-based
conferencing must be used. The new hardware for the Catalyst 4000 and 6000
switch families was developed with this requirement in mind. These new Catalyst
voice modules can handle conferencing in hardware, eliminating the requirement
of running a software conferencing service on a Windows NT server in the IP
telephony network.
Conferencing Design Details
The following points summarize the design capabilities and requirements of the
new Catalyst voice modules:
• Support for a maximum of 6 participants per conference call.
• The Catalyst 4000 WS-X4604-GWY module supports 24 conference
participants per module.
• The Catalyst 4000 WS-X4604-GWY module supports conferencing for
G.711 voice streams only. Transcoding can be used to convert G.729a or
G.723.1 to G.711 for conference calls.
• The Catalyst 6000 WS-X6608-T1 or WS-X6608-E1 modules support
32 G.711 or G.723 conference participants per physical port (256 per module)
or 24 G.729 conference participants per physical port (192 per module).
• The Catalyst 6000 WS-X6608-T1 or WS-X6608-E1 modules can support
both uncompressed and compressed VoIP conference calls.
• Each Cisco CallManager must have its own conference and MTP transcoding
resources, because the DSP resources can register with only one
Cisco CallManager at a time. Cisco CallManagers cannot share DSP
resources.
The Catalyst 4000 module, the WS-X4604-GWY, can support up to four
simultaneous conference calls of six callers each. The Catalyst 6000 T1 or E1
PSTN gateway module, the WS-X6608, also has the ability to support
conferencing. After the WS-X6608 has been added as a T1 or E1 Cisco AVVID
gateway, it can be configured, on a per-port basis, for conferencing services. The
Catalyst 6000 conferencing module supports up to six callers per conference call