Trying to find if Asterisk is suitable to this environment

Hello,
Before I jump into Asterisk, I need to find if it’s suitable as a backup PBX to Televantage server we have. What I want is, if our current PBX, Veritcal Televantage server fails, I like to move T1 PRI from it to Asterisk box and we receive/make calls. Current set up is described below.

Current system:
Vertical Televantage 7.5
Phone lines: 1 T1 PRI, 23 channels.
phones: Toshiba DKT-2010, DKT-2030

My plan. In case of the Televantage server fails, I unplug and plug the T1 PRI line(RJ45 connector) to T1 card in Asterisk box, then we make in/out calls through the box with the existing T1 line.
If then, maybe our current Toshiba phones will not work with Asterisk??? Is it possible to make Asterisk , somehow to convert the T1 PRI to SIP or VOIP so that we can make in/out calls using soft phones or Cisco VOIP phones? Or is there any already-in feature in Asterisk that supports various digital phones like ones we have?

I’m sorry to being vague, I can’t be much simpler than what I described here.

Hello,

Yes, it is possible, just need an digium TE130 Series card so Asterisk can handle the incomming calls.

There is a but, for your environment, if I’m correct, you would either need ata’s for all your phones or a xorcom astribank, to be able to use the current phones.

So, guess that it would be a bit troublesome to implement it in your environment.

Best way to go, just replace your current pabx for a asterisk based one, change all the phones for voip phones, then start injoying the possibilities of asterisk.

Good luck.

You can do it.

Your ISDN line is just a trunk, if you connect it to asterisk using any compatible PRI card and configure it the right way, all the calls from your T1 line will go to the SIP Phones you have (and the other way around), it doesn’t matter what brand or type as long it’s a SIP Phone.

Asterisk can’t handle digital lines (other than the trunk), for that you’d need extra hardware that as far i know isn’t available to Asterisk, besides analogue and digital lines are just about to die, that’s the whole point of using Asterisk, going all VoIP.

If you have the money and don’t want to do the unplug/plug manually you can always go for a T1/E1 failover switch.

As someone stated before, you’d be better going full Asterisk deployment.