Creating a small Cisco VOIP System - Need some help please

Asterisk Asterisk General
1

Hi All,

I am looking into creating a small VOIP only system (no PSTN lines whatsoever), using around 2-4 Cisco 7960G SiP IP Phones on an Asterisk/Elastix Platform. Later on down the track I may want to add in 2 wifi extensions for the building but not at this stage. I am new to all of this stuff and could use some help in setting up this small basic system.

My main confusion is with the hardware required. I am under the impression that all I need (besides phones, voip provider, server PC and internet access) is a multi-port 10/100 ethernet switch, to which I can plug all my extensions, internet connection, computers etc into. Is this the case or do I need something more? If I am correct, do I need to do any configuring to get the system to recognise which extension is plugged into which port, and which ports simply hook up to other computers/router, etc?

The second thought I would like to get some info on how compatible I can make the Cisco’s. I use them all the time at work, however they are on a SCCP config with Cisco-only hardware. Obviously things won’t be the same on opensource SiP, but I’m wondering if Call hold/park features could be configured the same (IE you press hold/resume on the Cisco Softkeys and it holds/resumes the call on that phone only, you press the park softkey and it automatically parks the call on a free park line, and shows on the display for a few seconds what park line it was taken to - rather than having to actually dial it into a park line manually), and also if I could set up a paging extension (dial a number and be able to put out a PA message over the speaker of all idle phones) Those are the only functions I would like to keep identical to Cisco’s SCCP protocol.

Anyway, after all of this, I think my main setup questions would be answered, the rest should be pretty self-explanitory. Any help would be appreciated! :smiley: Thanks everyone!

Nic.

2

You don’t sound confused at all. You take your computers, phones, internet router and plug it all into a switch. Actually if your internet router has the ports you could plug it into that.

You do not need to identify ports for the extensions. Your phones will use their SIP login information to register with the server. Which is how the server will know where the phone is to ring.

I can’t speak on the Cisco’s features…I only worked with the Aastra 6757i.

3

Mazzic,

Thanks for all the helpful information! Just say I wanted to go ahead with the 2 wireless phones (likely Asterisk application on iPod Touch or iPhone 4, as well as one laptop WAN for internet), how would I go about setting that up? Would I just have to plug in any old wireless access point to a spare port on the switch? Once again, would I need to do any configuring to get things running (Sorry to be a pain :stuck_out_tongue: ) ?

Thanks again!

Nic.

4

We have Asterisk, and I have one HTC with Android and couple of SIP phones installed. There is no problem using any wireless media to use SIP phones - neither WiFi, nor 3G. Of course I use global IP of our Asterisk server.
This mean - you need to “connect” somehow your WiFi phones to other part of net - same as you will connect some laptop through wireless connection.
There is only one serious potential problem - encryption - some wifi phones cant support nothing more then WEP (and this is almost no encryption at all)