Can I do this? Use asterisk to replace a large POTS system?

I looked into this a bit late last fall for this year. But it was too late to implement before the snow fell. Sooo… I’ve got a unique situation. I am the IT manager of a ski area that uses an old POTS phone system and huge com lines going all over the mountain to distribute our local phone system.

What I want to do is to replace the main “brain” of this phone system (mainly because it’s so old I can’t even get parts anymore) with an Asterisk system with the proper FXO and FXS cards to distribute the phone lines aroud the mountain over the existing com lines. This is a must for the lifts because we have no power at the top of the lifts and the runs are too far for POE so ethernet is out of the question for the lifts at least.

Phase 2 would be to start replacing phones around the lodges and admin areas with ethernet phones. I use Channel banks and T1’s to send the phone lines from one lodge to another.

Any help would be appreciated.

I don’t see why you couldn’t do this except I’m not sure how long of a cable run you can get away with using a TDM card or external FXS interface. I’ve got a TDM card in a test server at work but no way to test how far I can run it or I’d try it out and let you know. Good luck!

Tom