I am a complete newbie to Asterisk and would like to know if it will suit my needs. I work for a small company that acquired a nortel phone system with 8 meridian phones. My goal is to set up a system that is used more for communications from office to house, via dialing an extension, than it is to set up internal office extensions. There are 5 people that work from home throughout the US, and we need to be able to communicate with ease.
Will Asterisk support this function? Or is it more of a hardware issue? Any help is appreciated, I just want to know if this is the right direction.
Sure, it’ll support that just fine. Just have your remote users either run a SIP software program on the PC, or equip them with IP Phones (Budgetone models are a good example) or FXS interfaces (like the Linksys SPA-1001 for example). Set them up to register with the Asterisk server, and Asterisk will forward calls automatically wherever the person happens to be, all via the Internet. SIP software that runs on a computer is even more useful because it will work just about anywhere your users can get on the Internet!
and would like to know if it will suit my needs. I work for a small company that acquired a nortel phone system with 8 meridian phones. My goal is to set up a system that is used more for communications from office to house, via dialing an extension, than it is to set up internal office extensions. There are 5 people that work from home throughout the US, and we need to be able to communicate with ease.