The goal is to change out all of our edge devices with switches that are capable of delivering POE for VoIP. While we are at it, it also means ripping out all of the multi-mode fiber and replacing it with single mode fiber to support gigabit and eventually 10G. The total port count is just shy of 2000 and the phone count is about half that. Before asking for the project budget, I would like to solicit your opinions.

Do you have experience with either of the two or others? Which would you pick over the other? I know that the 3750 is stackable. Would you prefer stacking and port trunking or giving each switch a home run to the core (Catalyst 6000)?

Do any of you use the soft phones from the house with your home Internet connection? What do you think of it?

As a FYI, the VoIP solutions being considered are Cisco, Mitel and Avaya. All integrate with Exchange Mail and the Video Conferencing will be replaced as well to complete the Unified Communications suite.

Let me ask a dumb question first: POE is not cutting edge anymore, POE+ is.
Why isn't POE+ being considered?

Where does IPV6 enter?

Are you planning 2000 ports of gigabit? I hope not.

VOIP will put a QOS damper on things.

KISS, thanks for the response and questions.

The 100MB phones only require 7W per port and the GB phones that we decided on will take all of the standard 15.8 Watts per port. We may be a little short sighted here but I do not see where the 60 Watts we would get from POE+ is of benefit even a few years from now. I would love to hear a descenting opinion. Why would you do it? Surveilance cameras maybe? This is why I asked in the first place. Also, we would have to justify the additional power and UPS requirements in the network closets to offer 60W per port instead of 15.8 for a guaranteed uptime of 2 hours per port. We are asking for replacement of about 55 edge devices alone at about $430K. The additional cost of POE+ has to be a justified one.

We have not even considered the adoption of IPV6 yet for internal use yet. He have only started to upgrade a few of our servers to Win 2008. Not exactly on the "bleeding edge" of technology are we?

2000 ports of GB? Yes we are planning for it now to enable it in the future. We are not epecting it yet since we still have a lot of CAT5 installed from many years ago. In one building alone, we have 55,000 feet of it. The "campus backbone" alone requires a replacement of over 8,000 feet of fiber.

QoS is of the utmost concern which is why we are replacing our WAN infrastructure from an Internet based IPSEC VPN to MPLS and replacing the entire LAN infrastructure out to the edge devices and the cabling to the desktop where immediately required to enable 100MB minimum and GB preferred. CAT6 has been our standard for new installations for a while now.

The same project will be started by Q2 next year in three of our major foreign locations.