VoIP and Asterisk

[Kenneth E. Lussier]

On Wed, 2004-09-29 at 16:35 -0400, Ray Cote wrote:
> At 9:12 PM -0400 9/27/04, Jon maddog Hall wrote:
> >I have a couple of people who are interested in coming to talk about VoIP and
> >Asterisk.  With a little luck and some frequent flyer miles, we might be able
> >to get Mark Spencer, as well as a few people from other companies.
> 
> As interesting as VOIP is, I'd also like to hear about putting 
> together a small office system with Asterisk.
> 
> I have 8 analog POTS (plain old telephone system) lines coming into 
> the office and 32 internal phone lines. I've been following along 
> with some Asterisk mailing lists and looking at the Digium site, but 
> my casual research hasn't spotted the cards that would let me get 
> this many lines into a standard PC system.

I'm not sure what you mean by "32 internal phone lines". If by that you
mean you have 32 phones in your office, then this is fairly easy. There
are a few ways that you can do it:

The 8 POTS lines that come in from the PSTN would go into 2 TDM400P
cards each with 4 FXO modules. Or, you could get an FXO channel channel
bank (adtran, accessbank, etc.), wire the 8 lines to that then run a T1
line to a T100P card. This would also let you expand to 24 lines if
needed (at which point, it would just be easier to get a PRI).  

The 32 internal phones could be a bit of a problem. If you are planning
on switching to IP phones, then it's no problem. You just plug the
phones and the asterisk box into the network. You could also switch to
"soft-phones" and have people use their PC's as their phones. You can
get IP phones fairly cheap if you just want standard desk phones.

If you want to keep the 32 analog phones, then there could be a problem,
as you would need 32 FXS ports (8 cards x 4 ports each), and I don't
know too many systems that have 9 or 10 PCI slots. However, chances are,
the phones that you have are not analog phones. They are most likely
digital, and would require an ATA.
    
> I currently have a seven year old phone system I'm interested in 
> replacing and would appreciate hearing how Asterisk and available 
> hardware addresses my (fairly standard and minimal) situation.

Many people have replaced their aged phone systems with Asterisk. Buying
new IP phones can be a fairly expensive up-front cost (or extremely
expensive if you buy Cisco or PingTel phones), but it is still far less
expensive then buying a new phone system. 

FYI,
Kenny
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