My name is Steve and I am working as a undergrad research assistant.
We recently got a project from a local company to design a 500+ customers VoIP network for their hospital and My prof assigned me design duties.
Last 2 months I spend time on web looking for design documents help and playing arround with asterisk. I read a couple of books on SIP also.
Here is a over all requirement.
Hospital is WIFI connected and they are going to replace all PSTN/PBX phone with cisco/polycom VoIP phones. All of them are on private network and register to asterisk server private side.
Employes and labs away from hospital are going to register to Public side of asterisk. They are looking for 500+ lines to register to them.
Local ISP provider offered to terminate their connection to PSTN.
Here are a few questions if anyone of you have time to answer.
What kind of setup I am looking for?
Does asterisk listen on both Interfaces?
Does asterisk deal with SIP /NAT issues with VoIP terminator?
What is a typical network like this look like? (I do have a network diagram and I dont know how to share here.)
Where can I find Info on designing this kind of networks
Do I need Session boarder controllers? If so where they will be?
If i understand what you said correctly, you are looking at implementing a Internal/External VoIP network for hospital usage. Asterisk can do this, however you will have to spend some quality time mapping out and designing the network correctly. Asterisk is a very powerful Tool Kit, and with that power comes some complexities that you wouldn’t normally get with an off_the_Shelf IPBX system.
The things you need to look at is how you want to build the network, I.E do you want to host the Server in the Hospital or remotely in a Data center? Or both? Each one of them have their own Pro’s and Con’s, you will need too look into this. However my suggestions would be to do both, there is no such thing as not enough redundancy, Having one sitting in a Small Data Room in the Hospital, and also an Identical Server in the Data Center would be an ideal situation, The Hospital one Having E-1’s connected directly too it, and the Data Center one having either E-1’s or a Direct IP connection to a Terminating ITSP, or even both. I guess those are things that need to be discussed more in depth, maybe by you leading with questions, this way you can get probably a more varied response from the GURU’s on these forums.
If i understood your question properly, then YES it does, you just have to Configure Asterisk so it knows to do it, Asterisk is not quite at the stage of reading your mind yet, but the rate it is going wont be long before it does
In Short YES, once again it does depend on your ITSP and their configuration and also what you Tell Asterisk to do in its configuration files.
If you can find somewhere to post your Diagram that would be good, we can at least see what your thought process is.
Anywhere and Everywhere on the Internet, the question i guess is, how confused to you want to get?
In any event you can use Asterisk for this, either using the same box or designing another box to do this independently, you may want to look on the VoIP Wiki and look at the various and in depth information on there.
In any event make sure you put a lot of time in understanding exactly what they want, then you put that too paper, once you have everything listed down, then you start looking at the network design, once you have a pretty good idea how you want it too look/act/feel then you begin looking at the equipment needed to make this network function, once that is completed then you start connecting all the dots. I can say with confidence that pretty much what you want to do, Asterisk can do it, its just that the more you want to do, the more work is required in research and development, but what ever you do, do not expect to churn something out over night, this will take you some time to work on if you want to get it right.
If you have any specific questions, then you may want to list them down.
