Voice and Data Network Design

Course Description

Voice and Data Network Design has students examine Wide Area Network design through requirement determination, network structure planning, technology selection, and results evaluation.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, CNT is the Computer Networking prefix. Daytona State publishes this as CNT4703 at 3 credits, offered summer and fall, with CNT4007 as prerequisite.

The order of the four activities in the catalog description is the discipline in miniature, and it is the order most people get wrong. Requirements, then structure, then technology, then evaluation. The characteristic failure in network design is choosing the technology first — picking a vendor, a circuit type, or an architecture because it is familiar or because a salesperson was persuasive — and then discovering that the requirements it was supposed to meet were never written down. A design that cannot state what it is optimising for cannot be evaluated at all.

⚠ Two contact-hour figures apply here — make sure you use the right one

Daytona State publishes the unsuffixed form of this course at 3 credits, which at its lecture convention of 15 contact hours per credit gives approximately 45 hours — CEN4010, CEN3722, CNT2402, OST2401 and CGS1570 are all live at 3 credits and 45 hours.

The queued number carries a C suffix, which marks a combined lecture-and-laboratory course and normally implies scheduled laboratory time on top of the lecture. The figure shown in this guide is therefore priced at the combined-course convention of 20 contact hours per credit, giving 60 — the ratio this repository records consistently for C-suffixed courses across ETD, ETS, CTS and other prefixes.

⚠ Both figures are given deliberately. If you are looking at Daytona State's unsuffixed course, 45 is the figure; if you are looking at the C-suffixed course at another institution, 60 is the estimate and the offering institution's own catalog is authoritative. Confirm before relying on either.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Determine network requirements from business and technical needs.
• Characterise existing traffic and forecast growth.
• Distinguish and quantify performance requirements.
• Describe bandwidth, latency, jitter, and loss and their effects.
• Describe the particular sensitivity of voice and video to delay and jitter.
• Describe availability requirements and how they drive cost.
• Design a hierarchical network structure and justify it.
• Describe wide area network topologies and their trade-offs.
• Describe WAN technologies and select among them.
• Describe circuit provisioning, carriers, and service level agreements.
• Design IP addressing and routing for a wide area network.
• Describe routing protocol selection for WAN environments.
• Design quality of service policy and classification.
• Describe voice over IP architecture and its components.
• Design a network to carry voice reliably.
• Describe redundancy, failover, and the elimination of single points of failure.
• Describe network security design across a wide area network.
• Design remote access and site-to-site connectivity securely.
• Estimate cost and evaluate design alternatives against requirements.
• Describe capacity planning and oversubscription.
• Design network management, monitoring, and measurement.
• Document a network design so that it can be built and supported.
• Evaluate an implemented network against its design requirements.
• Describe migration and cutover planning for network changes.

Optional Outcomes

• Describe software-defined wide area networking.
• Describe carrier and provider network architecture.
• Describe wireless and satellite links in WAN design.
• Describe unified communications and contact centre design.
• Describe network automation and configuration management.
• Prepare for a networking certification.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Requirement determination
• Traffic characterisation and forecasting
• Performance requirements
• Bandwidth, latency, jitter, and loss
• Voice and video sensitivity
• Availability and cost
• Hierarchical design
• WAN topologies
• WAN technology selection
• Carriers and service level agreements
• Addressing and routing design
• Routing protocol selection
• Quality of service design
• Voice over IP architecture
• Designing for voice
• Redundancy and failover
• WAN security design
• Remote access and site-to-site connectivity
• Cost and alternative evaluation
• Capacity planning
• Network management and monitoring
• Design documentation
• Evaluation against requirements
• Migration and cutover

Optional Topics

• Software-defined WAN
• Carrier network architecture
• Wireless and satellite links
• Unified communications
• Network automation
• Certification preparation

Resources & Tools

• Build things and keep them. In computing the portfolio is the qualification — a public repository of working projects with readable code and a clear README does more for employment than a transcript.
• Git and a public repository host — free; version control is expected of every candidate, and using it from your first course is the cheapest habit to acquire.
• Free-tier cloud accounts (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle) — real infrastructure to practise on at no cost; set a billing alert before you start.
• Virtualisation and containers — VirtualBox and Docker are free, and a broken lab you can rebuild in a minute is what makes experimentation cheap.
• Official documentation — language, database, and framework docs are authoritative and version-correct in a way that copied answers are not. Learning to read documentation is the skill that separates practitioners.
• Vendor certifications — Microsoft, AWS, Oracle, CompTIA and Cisco credentials are named by employers in job advertisements; many have free training paths and student pricing.
• Your instructors and the lab — supervised time on real systems is the part you cannot get from a video.
• Internships and co-op placements — the strongest single predictor of employment at graduation. Start looking a year before you think you should.
• Network simulation and emulation tools — Cisco Packet Tracer, GNS3 and EVE-NG are free or free for study, and building a topology you can break is how design intuition is developed.
• RFCs (rfc-editor.org) — free; the actual protocol specifications, and far more readable than students expect.
• Cisco, Juniper and CompTIA certification paths — employers name these in advertisements, and the study material is largely free.

Career Pathways

• Software developer — SOC 15-1252.
• Computer systems analyst — SOC 15-1211; the requirements-and-design role.
• Database administrator and architect — SOC 15-1242 and 15-1243.
• Data analyst, business intelligence developer, and data engineer — strong demand and a common entry route for people who like data more than application code.
• Network architect — SOC 15-1241; and network and systems administrator, SOC 15-1244.
• Information security analyst — SOC 15-1212; strong growth, and systems or database work is the usual route in.
• Data scientist and machine learning practitioner — SOC 15-2051.
• Systems integration and enterprise applications — frequently overlooked by students and consistently well paid.
• Florida's defence, space, and simulation sector, plus healthcare, hospitality, financial services and a large public sector — ⚠ many defence roles require U.S. citizenship and some a security clearance.
• Managed service providers and consultancies — broad exposure quickly, and a common early career step.
• Continue to a bachelor's or graduate degree — Daytona State's computing bachelor's programmes are the direct route.

Special Information

⚠⚠ Voice is unforgiving in a way that data is not

• A file transfer tolerates delay and retransmission; a conversation does not. That single difference drives most of what makes voice design distinctive.
• ⚠ Latency has a hard budget. Beyond roughly a fifth of a second one way, people start talking over each other, and the call feels broken even though every packet arrived.
• ⚠⚠ Jitter is frequently worse than raw latency. Variable delay causes the receiver's buffer to under- or overrun, producing dropouts and robotic audio — and a link with good average latency and bad jitter sounds terrible while every measurement looks fine.
• Small amounts of loss are audible. Voice degrades noticeably at loss rates a file transfer would not even notice.
• Quality of service is not optional if voice shares a link with data. Without classification and priority, one large file transfer ruins every call on the circuit.
• ⚠ QoS must be applied consistently end to end. Marking traffic on your network means nothing if the carrier ignores the marking — check what your service level agreement actually commits the provider to.
• Plan for power and survivability. Telephones used to work when the electricity failed; IP phones do not unless someone designed for it — and in Florida that is a hurricane-season question, not a theoretical one.
• ⚠ Emergency calling has legal requirements, including accurate location information and direct dialling — and it is the part of a voice deployment most often left until last. Verify it works from every site before go-live.
• Measure with the right tools. Availability graphs do not show jitter; call quality metrics do.

⚠ Design for failure, and write the design down

• Ask what breaks when any single component fails — a circuit, a router, a site, a power feed. Every single point of failure should be deliberate and documented, not accidental.
• ⚠ Redundancy that shares a path is not redundancy. Two circuits from two carriers frequently run in the same conduit, and organisations discover this when a backhoe takes both — ask for diverse path documentation rather than assuming.
• Test failover deliberately and on a schedule. Untested failover fails when it is needed, and the failure is usually a configuration drift nobody noticed.
• Match redundancy to what the business actually needs. Availability is expensive and each additional nine costs disproportionately — that is a business decision, and it should be made explicitly rather than by an engineer's instinct.
• ⚠ Florida adds hurricane planning to WAN design: site survivability, generator and fuel provision, diverse routing out of the region, and the practical question of how the network is managed when staff cannot reach a building.
• Document the design and keep it current. Topology, addressing, circuits, contacts, and the reasoning — because the person troubleshooting at three in the morning is frequently not the person who designed it.
• Label physically as well as logically. Tedious once, invaluable repeatedly.
• Monitor and baseline. You cannot recognise abnormal without knowing what normal looks like, and the baseline has to be captured before there is a problem.

⚠⚠ The queued number carries a C suffix that Daytona State does not

• The statewide inventory carries this course as CNT4703C. Daytona State publishes it as CNT4703, titled "Voice and Data Network Design", with no C suffix — and the C-suffixed URL does not resolve in its catalog.
• ⚠⚠ Under Rule 22 the C suffix is part of the course number, and equivalency does not cross it. CNT4703C and CNT4703 are distinct SCNS numbers, so credit for one does not automatically satisfy a requirement written for the other.
• The suffix normally signals a combined lecture-and-laboratory structure. An institution publishing the C form may therefore run it with scheduled laboratory time and a different credit or contact-hour value from Daytona State's.
• The figures in this guide are Daytona State's. Confirm the credit value, structure, and prerequisites with the institution you are actually enrolling at or transferring to.
• Raise it in advance if you are transferring in either direction. Departments resolve this routinely when asked early and badly when asked at registration.

⚠⚠ Authorisation is the line between a computing professional and a defendant

• Never access, scan, modify, or extract data from a system you do not have permission to touch. The technical knowledge these courses give you is exactly what makes unauthorised access easy, which is why the rule matters more in this field than in most.
• Federal exposure: the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act criminalises unauthorised access to a protected computer, and "exceeding authorised access" has been read broadly.
• ⚠⚠ Florida exposure is separate and additional: the Florida Computer Crimes Act, Chapter 815, Florida Statutes, makes offences against computer users, systems and data punishable under state law independently of federal law.
• Having credentials is not the same as having authorisation. Being technically able to query a table or read a record does not mean you may, and systems log that you did.
• Use the lab and build your own. A local database, a virtual machine, or a personal cloud account costs little or nothing and lets you practise lawfully anything that would be unlawful elsewhere.
• Get scope in writing before any authorised testing or administrative engagement.
• ⚠ Rule 11 applies — computer crime and privacy law changes; verify rather than relying on a course guide.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement — and it is live here, since Daytona State offers both associate-level and bachelor of science coursework in these prefixes.

CNT4703C is published by Daytona State as CNT4703 at 3 credits and approximately 45 contact hours, offered summer and fall, with CNT4007 as prerequisite.

⚠ Note the suffix divergence — see the note above.