Asterisk
Our fiscal year ends this week and a new one begins next week. So I’m looking over my budget and figuring out what I’m going to get when. I came up with some estimates a few months ago when we had to submit our budgets, but now that’s all done and it’s about time to start spending.
If you’ve been following my blog, which I would assume you have been if you’re reading this, then you should know that I have some plans to upgrade our servers a bit to help with our DR Plan. The other major item on my agenda is our phone system. We’ve been limping along on an old Samsung ProStar DCS for many years now. I couldn’t really tell you how long because it was here long before I was. We’ve taken a few lightening hits over the years, and we have several bad ports on the system. There’s lots of weird little quirks that are a result of our outgrowing the system as it is now, and the lightening I’m sure. So for a few years now I’ve been looking into upgrading. I’ve had several quotes that I’ve submitted over the past three years, but the money has never been there. The major budget issue is the number of phones. Any proprietary system I’ve had quoted requires special proprietary phones that usually cost $200-$300 and we need about 80 of them.
So now I’ve come up with a different solution. Asterisk is an open-source telephony solution that will run on any PC and is open-standards so I have a lot of different hardware vendors to choose from. What I have recently discovered is that I can use an Asterisk server in conjunction with our current proprietary system. Basically I would setup an Asterisk server and connect it to our PSTN lines, then connect then Asterisk Server to our proprietary system. Then we can keep all our proprietary phones in place for now, and add newer feature-rich VoIP phones as the need arises. We could also implement SoftPhones, etc. The configuration will be a bit tricky to get the VoIP phones on the Asterisk server to work seamlessly with the proprietary phones on the Samsung system, but it is doable. So I’m going to do it. The only up-front cost will be the cost of the server I install Asterisk on. It will need some special hardware that will drive the cost up, but it won’t be that bad. I will need 16FXO ports to connect out 16 analog phone lines coming into the building, then I can connect the Asterisk server to the Samsung system via a T1 interface. I’ve found some tutorials for setting up such a configuration with different proprietary PBX’s and I found a forum post by a guy who claims to have done this exact same configuration with a Samsung Prostar DCS, so I know it can be done.
Anyway, when I actually get the hardware and get it all setup I’ll be sure to include a detailed tutorial on my blog. Until then, join our game of Diplomacy at http://www.geeks-4-jesus.org/diplomacy. We only need ONE MORE PERSON to start a game!!! So PLEASE sign-up TODAY!!!
[...] Justin Moore. Both are currently using Asterisk and are VERY happy with it. And they suggested the plan I had been working on as a means to slowly replace an old PBX system. It was good to have these things confirmed and [...]