MGCP viability and forward design planning

[stephan.l.martin1]

Greetings,

I am currently studying the CCNP Collaboration (working on CLACCM at the moment) and I was curious as to the viability of MGCP controlled voice ports for PSTN integration over current technologies such as SIP. As it stands I have a deployment that utilizes MGCP to our VGR and all works fine but I am more curious about future planning and what the responsible design decision would be moving forward. Unfortunately Collaboration isn't my strong suite and so voice design and where to find design documents is a weakness. If there is a Design Zone document that addresses this very question please feel free to point me in that direction- but I am interested in the communities input on the use of MGCP.

Thank you in advance for any insight you can offer!

[Nithin Eluvathingal · Accepted solution]

Refer the Live presentation. 

https://www.ciscolive.com/c/dam/r/ciscolive/apjc/docs/2018/pdf/BRKUCC-2006.pdf

[stephan.l.martin1]

Thank you Nithin! In my efforts to gain a better grasp of voice technologies I want to understand the design decisions that would lead someone to prefer one method over the other. Completely spaced on looking to Cisco Live.

Edit: An additional resource for anyone else that may be interested- Cisco design zone does have a Collaboration section. Here is a link for Gateway specific design considerations: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/cucm/srnd/collab12/collab12/gateways.html#marker-1264078

The design recommendation is SIP however site constraints will dictate the design (as always)

[Scott Leport]

Hi Stephan,

It works well in an environment where you have centralized call control. A real world example could be an ISP who allow customers to use their UC core / voice platform, which is a CUCM cluster. Lets say this ISP is assigning customer A 10 DDIs, customer B 5 DDIs, customer C 15 DDIs and so on. When I was last using MGCP, the common protocols were H.323 or MGCP. If you were using H.323, in the example I provided above, that dial-peer configuration can get quite verbose (and potentially messy), especially if you're having to route those multiple number ranges towards your CUCM cluster, which may contain multiple nodes!

With MGCP, that call control is backhauled from the gateway to CUCM and CUCM handles all of that. Sure, there may Route Patterns & Translations to configure at the CUCM to route calls accordingly, but IMO, its easier to deal with RPs and TPs on CUCM up front than it is to deal with translations on Voice Gateways.

Of course, that point I made above could be debated and sometimes its down to preference of the engineer and what fits in best with the customer or business requirements.