VPN integrated in IP phones?

[PBX_master]

Hi, the company I work for is talking about starting to sell Mitel. And one rumor that i flowing around in the sales department is the the IP phones have some sort of integrated VPN connection. That would make it very easy to connect the phones from anywhere you like, without any external VPN or any other rules in the existing firewalls an so forth. Is this rely true or false?

[ralph]

True.

However to make this happen you need a Mitel Border Gateway controller (MBG).
This server sits in you DMZ and proxies the voice traffic from your remote phone to the local voice network.
Works very well.

But, don't make the mistake of thinking (like one of my sales reps did) that the VPN will allow you access from your laptop into your data network.
This only applies to voice.

Ralph

[brantn]

There is no vpn built into Mitel phones that I know of and MBG does not setup a vpn. Avaya is one brand that does offer this in phones. You can however use MBG to transition the phones from public to private in a secure manner. The phones and MBG use Maitai packets for transmission which is a proprietary Mitel packet structure.

[bobcheese]

I think the Mitel 5000 has some sort of feature where you can plug a phone onto the net
And it tunnels back to the controler. Like teleworker without the need for MBG 

[mav]

Ralph is spot on here...

A lot of sales guys say that once your teleworker connects to the 3300 via MBG then the PC port on the set is also connected to HQ via VPN. This is NOT the case at all. I have a Teleworker set at home, connect to HQ via MBG and it works just fine.

If you had a router that could nail up a vpn to HQ then you would not need MBG in theory, however it controls jitter etc so is always recommended by Mitel.

Hope this helps

[brantn]

That is correct being that the phone and MBG is not setting up a VPN you can't use company resources on your local machine.

[ralph]

Now having said all that...

It is possible to set up a PPTP connection to the MBG so that you can get access to the data network from a remote PC.

Done it - but I cringe at the security issues involved.

Ralph