Phones for Asterisk and single-pair old phone wiring?

[Ben Scott]

On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 9:44 AM, Thomas Charron <twaffle at gmail.com> wrote:
>  I looked for a link, but didn't see it in the emails from Ken L.
> Citel box I assume?

  Yah, the Citel Portico TVA.  Ken didn't have a direct link, but he
posted a link to an Asterisk page (for other reasons), and that page
linked to Citel.  Citel's sales organization appears to be
incompetent, though.  I'm having a hard time finding anyone who is
local and can offer a solution package.

  If anyone knows of a reasonably local entity who can provide
consulting and installation services for Asterisk and Citel Portico,
please refer me!  :-)

>  That's another curiosity question.  How many stations we talking?

  We've got a Norstar MICS.  It is currently configured with 96 TCM
station ports and 20 analog trunk ports, plus a NAM voice mail unit.
Usage (as of today) is 87 TCM stations and 15 POTS lines.  The new
building will have somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 stations.
We'll likely add four or so off-premise IP stations as well.

  (TCM  = Time Compression Multiplexing.  Nortel proprietary protocol.
 Digital.  Runs over a single copper pair of voice grade wiring.)

  Brining TCM stations to our new building requires a non-trivial
investment.  The distance exceeds maximum for copper TCM, so we need
to run fiber to the new building and put the TCM station modules in
the new building.  That also requires fiber "module extenders".  We're
out of DS-30 fiber ports on the MICS core unit, so we need to add
another expansion card, plus upgrade the firmware to support that.

  So the plan is to go IP only in the new building.  This also means
we can skip running dedicated voice wiring in the new building.  We
can cover about half the cost of a VoIP upgrade this way, and gain all
the features a modern VoIP system has.

-- Ben