I have a dental software company that works extensively with patient communication, Asterisk is used for all automated phone calls to patients, as well as our own office phones.
I am interested in extending that service to handling the phone services of the offices we support, but am rather new to this type of usage and so wanted to ask a couple probably basic questions.
Our reason for extending into the space is to have access to Caller ID info to bring up patient info on incoming calls, statistics, integrate outbound calls from the practice management software and such.
We have an account with Bandwidth as one of our VoIP providers, which comes in to our main Asterisk server. Main server has dual 8 core 2.9Ghz processors with 160GB RAM running Asterisk 13.17.0. This server is set up with sip.conf. Our server for our office lines uses pjsip.conf and runs Asterisk 16.9.0. So I have some familiarity with both setups, but there is no communication between the two setups.
For a dental office to subscribe, I assume that the firewall configuration would have to be updated to do port forwarding, but it seems that while it could be simple for a single phone, if there were multiple extensions, the can’t all be on port 5060.
That leads me to wonder if I should have something like a Raspberry Pi with Asterisk preconfigured to connect to my main server, and treat the main server as a SIP Trunk, and then each desk phone would connect with the local Raspberry Pi?
For a service like RingCentral, if they wanted to have multiple office phones, would they need a dedicated PBX inside the office, or does each phone connect directly with the RingCentral VoIP server?
Do the remote offices need to get static IP addresses?
If I want to use TLS, can I use pjsip, or only sip?
Maybe most importantly, is Asterisk the right place to start, or should I be looking for another product?