Hello I’m new at telephony, and I work for a 4 person company. I don’t have time to read docs for 3 days to find out if what I’m considering will NOT work. Please forgive me if this information is available and I have simply not found it yet.
Right now we have a Vonavi Starplus 616 and a bunch of old phones. We have 3 analog phone lines. We have racks of linux servers coming out of our wazu. It seems logical to me to upgrade us to a linux voice mail type of system.
If I understand correctly, I can buy some of the X100P cards, stick them into PCI slots of a linux server, install Asterisk, connect the analog lines to the X100P cards, and use the 100Mbps LAN with some Cisco 7960 phones to access the analog phone lines via Asterisk. Will this work? Is this correct? Will the Cisco phones “connect” to Asterisk via the TCP/IP network that already exists in the linux server?
Additional question. Assuming the above is correct and will work, can Asterisk connect to the Starplus SP61612 phones? I’m assuming the answer is either “no” or “you’d need an FXS that doesn’t exist.” But I thought I’d ask since we still have a bunch of these phones.
Again I apologize if this information is readily available. I have found tons of information on the FXO side, but it seems like for the inside, I’m just “supposed to know” how it works. Perhaps that is because it is so simple, or perhaps I just haven’t found the information yet.
You could, but for deployment purposes you’d be far better served with a Digium Wildcard TDM400P and three FXO modules (this configuration is available preassembled as the TDM03B). The X100P has been discontinued a while, Digium doesn’t support it, and the cards available today are Winmodems someone took a soldering iron to in a back room. There tend to be call quality and reliability issues using the X100P knockoffs, which isn’t the sort of thing you want to deal with for a business.
You’ll also have a lot more room for other cards, as the TDM400P can take four port modules, whereas an X100P configuration would need one card for each port.
Yes. This is actually among the easier things to do when you’re building a dialplan.
As long as they can snag an appropriate IP from a DHCP server (or you configure them manually for static IPs), yes. If you’re replacing many phones, you’ll want to set up a TFTP server to deploy configuration information and firmware to the Ciscos – configuration can be done manually, but it’ll be much more work.
Also, you’ll probably want to reload the Ciscos with the SIP firmware (or buy them that way). While Asterisk does have two functional modules for Cisco’s Skinny protocol, they’re not complete (since it’s not an open spec), and some of the phone’s features would be unavailable.
