I am very excited to be installing AsteriskNow as I type this on one of my spare machines laying around. I have been looking for a pbx system for a friends small business for some time now, but haven’t found a cheap reliable system for small business until freepbx. Anyways, I need some advice on what I need to purchase to make this work.
As of right now, my buddy has 1 analog line running into his business. He’s in the entertainment business, and although he does get calls, he doesn’t get overwhelmed with them. He has 4 analog phones conveniently placed throughout his business. The main reason for him wanting a phone system is for the automated menu’s for the schedule, hours, and so on… However, I would want to install 2 seperate extentions for him. Two phones will be on one extention (they are just a few feet from each other), and the other two phones will be on another extension. Therefore, when a certain extention is dialed, it will ring two of the phones. I will also want the phones to be able to dial out at all times.
If anyone could tell me what I would need to complete my system and to get it to work properly, please let me know! I appreciate your advice!
I like the idea of SIP better as well primarily since it should be cheaper than analogue phone lines from the current provider.
Does he have the internet at the office? How fast is it? There are many sites that can test the VOIP latency and Quality of Service (QoS) so you can get an idea of how a call may sound, like this one. http://myspeed.visualware.com/indexvoip.php
While the initial cost of setting the store up on SIP may be more expensive, (because of buying the phones) I think it would be cheaper once you can cancel the current phone plans. My parents pay $60 for telephone service for one phone line and they don’t even have long distance!
Your POTS line is your trunk. Sip phones are simply the phone instruments that ate plugged into the system.
If you have a reasonable internet connection, you can use SIP trunking to access the outside world. You can even buy that from this site. Faxing probably won’t work in a pure SIP environment, though.
In a word, the type phones vs the type network access you have are two separate issues.
you don’t have the same on both sides of the Asterisk switch.
In addition to SoftEcho that was previously mentioned by Bill, there is also another commercial product for noise & echo cancellation that works well with Asterisk. See http://www.solicall.com/products.html#PBXMate for details.
I got a Digium TDM410P, with 2 FXO ports and 2 FXS ports. For me, this will be plenty. I have two analog lines coming in already for my alarm system and my fax machine, so I figured the analog route would be the easier way. I will have 2 phones hooked up to one of the FXO’s, and the other 2 hooked up to the other FXO. I will also tie the fax machine into one of the FXO ports, because one of the extensions will not have voicemail enabled (I will be using the primary extension for all voicemail)… this way, the fax will pickup. All in all, it should be a nice little system and everything should work out.
Thanks again guys for everything… I really appreciate the help this community provides!
You’d need an FXS port for each POTS line coming into the system.
If you want to use analog phones, you’d need an FXO for each extension. (Not Physical phone)
Faxing might be problematic. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I’ve had pretty good results with the Linksys/Cisco SPA-2102.
So what you’d be looking at is a card like the TDM400P (take a look at the Sangoma products too) with one FXS module and 2 FXO modules. That will take care of the POTS and analog phones. And a Linksys/Cisco SPA-2102.
You’ll also want to get a card with onboard hardware echo cancellation.
If you must, you can use the asterisk onboard echo cancellation routines, but they can be tricky to set up, but if you’re on a budget, it might be worth it.
There is also a commercial software echo cancellation application that I’ve heard works well. (see http://www.octasic.com/en/products/softecho.php)
I forgot to add that there would also be a fax machine (analog). So would that be 3 fxs ports? Would that do it? As I said, I would want everything to have a dial tone and be able to dial out. Would the TDM400P work?