Advice Needed

General Help
1

I am wondering if anyone might shed some light on a few questions that I have.

I need to deploy a small scale pbx system and I am wondering about the best way to do so.

Questions:

  1. what is a good but not overly expensive PSTN card and where might I be able to get it?
  2. where is a good place to get a LOT of 10 SPA942 telephones?
  3. where is a good tutorial on configuring analog telephones into the FreePBX system?

Thanks in advance!!

2

Chase,

You remember the classic triangle? you can have two, good, fast, and cheep. In the card market it’s good, cheep and well supported.

As for card vendors sangnoma, rhino, digium, if possible you want hardware echo canceling which again costs more. It’s possible to get a $75 clone for a digium tdm400 card but you get what you pay for. zero support and if there is a issue with the card it will take a while getting it replaced, versus paying for it up front.

As for phones, go to the manufactures site and select a dealer or use google. There are a ton of places that sell them… Again you get what you pay for. I personally prefer Aastra phones they rock. I’ve worked with Polycom, and Cisco also and they are good (cisco quality rocks but you pay or it) but I prefer Aastra for the $. The big catch with Cisco is support is non-existant when you want to connect to anything that is NOT Cisco call manager based but if you know your stuff it’s not hard.

FreePBX does not configure phones, it configures extensions. it’s up to you the admin to do the configuration and/or use a distro that has a end point manager for the phones you want to use.

my Prefered distro of choice are asteriskNow 1.5( it’s still listed as Beta currently) or PBX-in-a-flash or hand build it.

others of course will have different opinions…

3

Thanks for the info, I really appreciate it. I know I don’t want the bottom of the barral card, but not top of the line either. Something of good quality that doesn’t break the bank. I personally love the Linksys SPA-942 phones and have experience with them, what I don’t have experience with is the actual configuration of the PSTN Analog line in the PBX, just a good tutorial is all I need there.

Cards:
just need some recommendations on quality vs price and what people have been happy with in the past. (Make and Modal)

Phones:
just need an idea as to who can provide me with the best price possible on SPA-942 phones (in Canada if possible)

Config:
just need a good tutorial on configuring the PSTN into the FreePBX… I have done SIP in the past (with Callcentric), but have never done analog

4

The telephone interface card is the key in the system. You will have a lot less grief if you purchase a quality card with onboard echo cancellation.
www.digium.com…www.sangoma.com…www.rhinoequipment.com

I’ve used Rhino, Sangoma, and, of course, Digium Cards.

All of these manufactures have setup instructions available on their respective websites.

Although this is old, it’s still got a lot of good info:

http://asteriskathome.sourceforge.net/handbook/#Section_3.2.2.1

Best bet for phones is just do a google search. I just googled SPA-942 and got back a number of vendors.

Just a note:

I’m partial to AASTRA phones (they’re a Canadian company). We’ve settled on the 9133i and the 55i here.

Bill/W5WAF