Asterisk integration with an existing NEC system

Hi all,

Let me first say that I did do a quick search of the archives for the answer but didn’t see anything that caught the specifics of what I’m asking. I work for a school district and we have 7 NEC PBX units. We use an X2000 as our main gateway and then have 4 2000IPS and 2 2000IVS boxes connected to it. All of the client phones are NEC. We’re looking a doing building renovations and therefore replacing one of the NEC IVS2000 with an IPS2000. It’s expensive and I’d like to explore looking at vendor-neutral hardware and asterisk. Can anyone comment on whether I can re-use the child boards from the existing NEC system and some of the potential challenges in integrating an asterisk system as a child of an NEC X2000 gateway? We’re talking about a 40k spend to upgrade and this number includes about 40 IP phone sets. The box we’re looking to replace connects to our primary gateway via fiber optic. It’s a seperate set of buildings on school-owned property so we own the infrastructure between buildings.

Thanks,

Jeff

My guess is no you cant use any boards from the NEC box.

If the NEC system supports SIP trunking then you can link the two via SIP. The other option is a “T1” crosscable between the two (not sure what the distance is or what the max T1 distance is so this may not work).

I can tell you that we bought 75 Polycom IP phones, a Dual proc Dell server, Digium 2port T1 card, a 24port analog channel bank and some other misc. items for about $25K. Phone systems with the same or fewer features for the same company started at $90K and went to $350K. Of course those included setup and configuartion which I did myself for Asterisk. I figure I spent 2 weeks full time a) learning Asterisk Basics and b) doing the actuall implementation so that means I would have to charge myself out at over $750/hr to equal the next lowest cost (MAN I WISH!).

Good luck, and feel free to ask if you need more help.

I also suggest you buy or download the book linked below as it will get you started easily.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510480/index.html