Phones for Asterisk and single-pair old phone wiring?

[Kenny Lussier]

On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 11:45 AM, Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 11:25 AM, Kenny Lussier <klussier at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Enhanced telephone set = Something more than a plain old telephone
>>> set.
>>
>> You can use pretty much any kind of phone that you want ...
>
>  I assume by "any kind of phone", you mean "any kind of
> SIP-capable-VoIP or analog-POTS phone".  Because I'm pretty sure I
> can't use any of the legions of proprietary telephones with Asterisk
> (or anything else other than the system they were designed for).  In
> other words, I can't plug a Nortel Norstar or Panaonic DBS or Toshiba
> DK digital telephone into a Asterisk system, can I?  :)

That all depends on what you want to do... You can leave all of your
phones connected to the Merridian/Norstar/whatever, then connect that
PBX to an asterisk box for external and internal connectivity. That
way, the user experience doesn't change at all. The POTS lones come
into the Asterisk box, which routes calls to the Nortel system, which
deals with the phones. You will, of course, have an extremely messy
configuration to deal with all of that, but it can be (and, sadly, has
been) done. Take a look at
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+Nortel or really, just search
voip-info.org for Nortel, and you will find a lot of information about
dealing with the two types of systems together.

Also, keep in mind that with Asterisk, you are not limited to SIP.
Several of the larger PBX vendors use what they call proprietary
protocals, but really amount to nothing more then h323. Unless your
talking about cisco's SCCP, but all of their phones can be flashed
with a SIP image :-)


C-Ya,
Kenny