Please forgive my newbie question, but is there a reliable digital phone (Not IP based) that is compatible with the asterisk system? I would really like to present a non IP phone to my company because of a past bad experience with running a phone system on IP phones and the many issues that arose. We currently have intertel 8560’s, but I would like any suggestions. Thank you all.
Hi, I can’t directly help but You should rename the topic name to be more specific. “Phones for Asterisk box” is vague when you only want to know about digital phones, something like “Does asterisk support any digital non IP phones?” is more clear.
Thank you for the suggestion. I am a little scatterbrained at the moment. Boss dropped kind of a big one on me for me to even look into this at the moment. Nothing like wrapping up 4 hours of FAQ’s, searching and manuals to help you to forget the english language!
There are a few SIP or T1/E1 to didgitale gateways out there but unless you have a massive amount of these phones the expense wont be worth it. From what I remember you would pay about $150/per port for the gateway.
The real root of the problem is the previous IP install was obviously a very bad one. Thousands of large compaies are running full IP setups with no issues. If your network is so busy it cant handle the voice traffic you always have the option of a completely seperate network. If the existing digital phones are connected to CAT5 wiring this may be a very easy task.
Could you get me a name or some search term I can use to get started looking? I’m not that into the phone lingo quite yet.
I agree that IP phones are stable, and possibly cheaper as well. However the taste of the old phone system is still pretty foul in the mouths of most of the management still. Our biggest issue was probably having consumer grade switches and 20 IP phones at our second site away from the PBX and DHCP and DNS being done on the router away from all the IP phones. The biggest issue was when something cut out for a second, which was often, you had to manually reset every single phone. I am recommending either a IP phone or SIP on the computer type solution, however I need the answers on why we shouldn’t use a digital type phone. Thank you very much for your help.
Hi
The major Gateway maker is Vegastream and they are relaible
But The intertel is a good IP system. The vast majority of problems are firmly routed in the LAN configuration and rarely has anything to do with the handsets. Was your LAN upgraded when the new sytem installed ? , And if it was or wasnt any problems should have easily been found by the supplier.
Ian
Our intertel system is not the IP system we were having issues with. We had a Comdial IPrimo phones before the intertel, and there are a ton of reasons that went wrong, including unreliable equipment, years of lack of maintenance and much much more.
Our issue with the intertel system is two part. One our supplier can’t keep out with our technical issues. We are pushing it pretty far as far as it’s capabilities are concerned, and we are having issues with the enterprise messaging system for faxing. Two of our three sites can not communicate with each other via T38 and the supplier is blaming our internet connection. Part of my issue with that is that G.711 works across the same network, where T38 doesn’t work at all. That makes me think it is a processing or encoding issue, not an IP issue. Even so I have next to no way to accurately tell where the issues lie, because the error reporting system is near indecipherable to both myself and to the supplier and intertel’s maintenance department. We also do not have much portability with many of the features, like customizing a fax cover page, and the call reporting system we are using is double and triple reporting calls. I would not say that the intertel system is bad, but between it and the suppliers maintenance abilities it is not a great fit for us.
I explain all this because I am sure many people out there know so much more than I do on the phone systems, and maybe looking into Asterisk is not the road I need to go down. I have already begun to replace the Intertel fax system with a Hylafax system, but am running into issues getting the intertel system to cooperate with the Hylafax system. I am just getting ready to start testing Asterisk and any warnings or suggestions would be wonderful. Thank you again.
Hi
Ok thats great, from you explanation it seems that your problem is round faxing and if theres one thing Asterisk isnt thats a enterprise fax server.
Your best bet is to find a new maintainer or contact Mitel/Intertel direct and explain the issues.
Ian
Nothing against Mitel, but I actually have, and due to contract issues with the people who sold the system to me, they can not directly interviene. Like I said it isn’t so much a hardware problem as a support issue. And I actually have hylafax working as a sudo enterprise server, and would use Asterisk as purely a phone switch. Other than route a fax call to Hylafax, it would do nothing more in the way of faxes. I say sudo fax system because I have not been able to pull DID info from the Intertel boxes to the hylafax system, and I am having difficulty in telling if it is the intertel box or the hylafax box which is the problem.
At the same time it would seem that Asterisk would fix a ton of our long term goals, like integrating the phones with the computer, allowing for quick and easy offsite offices and reducing expenses on systems, while keeping flexibility. Other than the service, which I am sure is not typical, my only other complaint is a lack of flexibility. Being of greater than average ability with computers and IT type systems, the owner of the company and I would love to have the ability to configure our system to do just about anything we need, without paying someone else thousands to make it do so. In essence, trade my manpower for long term savings.
You mentioned that Asterisk is not an enterprise fax server, but what are you opinions of it as an enterprise voice system? And please be brutal, I will be trying it out come hell or high water.
This can be simply remedied with ATA devices connect directly to the old phone or to an analog PBX system FXS ports.
I am interested in this one. I was under the impression that the quote above is incorrect. Could actually somebody clarify this, please. I have been spending hours on the Internet to try and find a definitive answer to this question. Are there any hardware devices (preferably PCI or PCI-e cards) which allow direct connection of legacy digital/key phones to Asterisk (such as those made by Nortel, Avaya, Norstar, Meridian etc. for their non-voip PABX systems)?
Several posts from 2003-2005 specify clearly that there are not hardware interfaces for these phones, and the Digium (and clones) analogue cards are … err … analogue cards - so I expect they won’t work with these phones, only with analogue phones which are normally plugged directly into PSTN lines.
Does someone know they full answer to this, please.
I am interested in this one. I was under the impression that the quote above is incorrect. Could actually somebody clarify this, please. I have been spending hours on the Internet to try and find a definitive answer to this question. Are there any hardware devices (preferably PCI or PCI-e cards) which allow direct connection of legacy digital/key phones to Asterisk (such as those made by Nortel, Avaya, Norstar, Meridian etc. for their non-voip PABX systems)?
Several posts from 2003-2005 specify clearly that there are not hardware interfaces for these phones, and the Digium (and clones) analogue cards are … err … analogue cards - so I expect they won’t work with these phones, only with analogue phones which are normally plugged directly into PSTN lines.
Does someone know they full answer to this, please.[/quote]
As far as I have seen there is no direct way to get a digital phone working from your asterisk box directly. One of the previous posters discribed and external interface to allow that to happen, but it appears that Asterisk is IP or Analog only.
I am interested in this one. I was under the impression that the quote above is incorrect. Could actually somebody clarify this, please. I have been spending hours on the Internet to try and find a definitive answer to this question.[/quote]
What I meant is you can simply connect some VoIP lines (from any ATA devices or through an Asterisk PBX system with FXS ports) to an existing (analog/hybrid) PBX system to replace its existing PSTN lines.
I am interested in this one. I was under the impression that the quote above is incorrect. Could actually somebody clarify this, please. I have been spending hours on the Internet to try and find a definitive answer to this question.[/quote]
What I meant is you can simply connect some VoIP lines (from any ATA devices or through an Asterisk PBX system with FXS ports) to an existing (analog/hybrid) PBX system to replace its existing PSTN lines.[/quote]
Just to clarify, the path your phone call would take would be into the Asterisk box, routed to the original PBX through whatever means available (In my case it would be T1 interfaces) and then passed to the handsets. I suppose that would work. It seems like a long way around though. I know my company would much rather sell the old system and buy some kind of new system rather than rig the old system. While this would not be a good fit for me I can see where this would be helpful, say, if someone needed to add SIP trunks and could not afford the Licensing on their original system.
Do I have the concept correct?