Hardware and new setup

We are a group of 13 primary (k-12) schools in the UK, each school at the moment has their own phone system supplied by 1 company, another company supplies support for the phone system and yet another company for the lines/calls.

I would like to move over to the following setup;

FreePBX server at the central office with the below hardware. Each extension around the schools log directly into the central phone system.

MSI C236M Workstation Motherboard
Intel i5 6400
6GB DDR4 RAM
2x 500GB SSD (RAID1)

Will I run into any issues with the above, i.e drivers needed.

I would like to also cut down on the amount of channels needed, but each school will need their own DDI. So is it possible that when you ring out from an extension a DDI gets attached to the call?

Your hardware requirements will depend on how many concurrent calls you will have, if you do a lot of call recording, etc.

How many extensions do you have for each school?

Is your plan to eliminate all phone systems except for one and run all non local phones as remote extensions or will you still have one PBX per school?

Yes, FreePBX allows you to present whatever CID you want for outbound calls, it will be up to your provider to honor that value.

I would imagine there would only ever be 50 concurrent calls but i’d like the room to grow as schools are continually joining our group (trust).There would be no call recording other than voicemail.

It ranges from school to school on the number of extensions, smallest would be around 7 and the largest around 40.

We would host the PBX in a school with a 100mb leased line and have remote extensions everywhere else.

I’d suggest getting some paid support from Sangoma on your design. You will want to implement a little bit of security, and phone-level VPN support would seem like a good idea. A good plan for preventing unauthorized access to your phone system would always be prudent.

You might also want to reconsider your decision to record phone calls - you might find some facility in recording all incoming calls.

I worked with one of the local Archdiocese on their phone system and we decided that having recordings of incoming calls seemed like a good idea.

We would only allow the remote extensions to connect to the system from static ip addresses known to our firewall which I believe would be a great start to securing the system.

Recording calls would fall foul of the data protection act in this country, soon to be the GDRP