Any CISCO guru's on this board? Need some help

As happens from time to time in my job a customer comes to me with a parts list of devices (in this case, already purchased and ready for install) and asks me to build them a system. I’ve likened this to handing someone a random bunch of car parts from a junkyard and telling them to build me a car…with no directions, just based on their understanding of how cars work.

In any case I have a customer who has done this to me. I actually have a CISCO rep who I would normally sit down with on this but that person is away for a few days and I dont’ feel like playing phone tag with their tech support today. So, instead, I thought I’d ask here in between meetings to see if anyone here has any idea. If not its no big deal.

Ok, here is the situation. The customer has ordered a T1 and a T3 that are going to link their two new facilities together and then link them back to their corporate offices. Basically the T1 will provide the link between the new facilities and the T3 will get them back to corporate. Easy so far.

The customer wants to us VoIP for their telephone system between their two new sites and also tie it into the public telephone system (but not, appearently, back to corporate). In addition they want to be able to do VTC across the T1 link between the two new sites (but again, not back to corporate).

Ok, all thats pretty easy to do…you just set up some kind of QoS or bandwidth on demand setup for the VTC (I’m assuming its an IP VTC system) to handle that when it happens, and then set up your VoIP with a QoS tag as well (since everything will be sharing the T1 pipe between the two facilities). However, whats confusing me is the parts they have ordered for the main router (i.e. what I assume is the router thats going to hook both back to corporate AND via T1 to the new site). Here is where the question comes in.

The router is a CISCO 3825-V/k9, basically one of CISCO’s mid range integrated services routers with a voice package added on. I believe the thing comes with 2 fast ethernet ports built in and then several slots for add on cards. Two of the cards they have ordered are no problem…one is a NM-1T3/E3 (basically just a T3/E3 network module) and the other is a WIC-1DSU-T1-V2 (just a T1 WIC). Its the other card that has me confused as to what role it would play: VWIC-2MFT-T1 (its a 2 port multiflex-T1).

Now, I know what the card does (sort of) though I haven’t ever used one before. What I can’t figure out is what its going to be used for. My first guess was they were going to bring in a separate T-1 (or 2 of them since its a 2 slot card) as access to the public phone system (i.e. to interface between the local VoIP system and allow for calls out to the public system). This still may be the case, but the customer hasn’t ordered 2 additional T-1 lines…only the one for local voice, data and VTC between the two sites. I’m at a loss for what else you could use this card for though and the customer has no idea (they were told they needed it but don’t know by whom). Of course, this could simply be a case where it really HAS no use, or they don’t need it…but I thought I’d ask first, and since I’ve gotten other technical questions answered here before, and since I don’t have access to my CISCO rep today, I thought I’d see if anyone was interested in this puzzle enough to respond. :slight_smile:

-XT