Phones for Asterisk and single-pair old phone wiring?

[Kenny Lussier]

On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 12:31 PM, Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 12:09 PM, Kenny Lussier <klussier at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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.
>
>  Hmmm.  I hadn't thought of that.  Use Asterisk as a PBX in front of
> the Norstar.  Configuration would be a bear, like you say, but once it
> got figured out, it would stay figured out.  We'd loose out on having
> an integrated system, though.  With one system, everything
> functions... well, as a system.  Lots of little things, but they add
> up.  Lke extension naming and calling station ID, internal call
> forwarding, voice message forwarding, busy station indicators, call
> pickup groups, internal hunt groups, integrated directory, etc.  So
> the user experience would not be anywhere near as smooth.  Something
> to think about, though.  Hmmmm...

You wouldn't necessarily lose these functions. Since they are all
functions of the current PBX, they would continue to work. If you put
the Asterisk box between the POTS lines coming in and the Nortel, then
when a call comes in, it hits Asterisk, which answers the call, and
runs the auto-attendant. From there, Asterisk accepts the extension
from the caller, then passes that to the dial plan as an argument. The
dial plan is set up to pick up a channel on the PBX and dial the
extension it was given as an argument. The rest is up to the Nortel
system. There is even a way for Asterisk to that the incoming CID and
pass that off to the Nortel, but I can't remember exactly how to do
that at the moment.

All calls within the Nortel system never touch asterisk, and all
Nortel features remain the same. When a caller wants to dial an
outside line, the Nortel picks up an open line, which in this case, is
the asterisk box, and the asterisk box passes the call on to the POTS
lines. So really, there isn't much difference to the end user.

Many people are looking at this and thinking "Well, what is the point
of the Asterisk box then?!?!". The point, in my case when I had to do
this a few years back, was that it gave us an expandability that was
otherwise impossible. When we had a second site, we could pick up the
phone, dial a 4-digit extension, and a phone would ring in the other
office. We had an asterisk box on the other end of our T1/private-line
that was set up the same way. The Norstar/Meridian systems that we had
weren't capable of multi-site, so it solved our problem. Eventually,
we took the Nortels out of the picture, replaced all of the phones,
and went PRI into the Asterisk boxes (bought Cisco 7960's to replace
the Nortel phones). So, having an Asterisk box can give you a lot more
flexibility, especially if you are going to be bringing up a new site.
You can build out the new site to be completely VoIP, but maintain
compatibility with the older proprietary system.

>> Also, keep in mind that with Asterisk, you are not limited to SIP.
>
>  Right; I was simplifying for rhetorical convenience.  The VoIP side
> of things isn't really my issue.  That's a solved problem.  :)

A solved problem is the best kind :-)

C-Ya,
Kenny