I am a newbie.to PBX. We have 3 analog phone lines @ work. Is there a simple system I can create / buy that allows these 3 lines to come into an unit, allows for options for callers (ie. press 1 for dept #1, 2 for depart #2) to leave a voice-message or an option to speak to human by passing the call to an analog phone.
Analogue phone lines need a FXO port and analogue telephones need a FXS port.
There are appliances with them eg: Vega 60G - Sangoma Technologies - no idea how much that thing costs. These appliances will generally need a PBX too but some can do the whole job.
You can also get PCI cards with them - some have mini RJ11 ports so you’ll need to sort that out.
An Asterisk based PBX with FXO/FXS ports will use DAHDI to communicate with them and it is not for the faint of heart!
I’m UK based and who knew how exciting our signalling standards for POTS could be - I’ve wasted quite a lot of time with it!
If you can go all in on VoIP - SIP n RTP or IAX2 or whatever - please do. Port your phone numbers to a non analogue provider and do it with IP.
If you can’t do that, then you will have to become an old school telephony engineer and it will take a while. I’ve given you loads of keywords but its a big old subject.
In the UK, you will, effectively, be forced to port in just over a year (date keeps slipping), although the default option may convert to analogue, on site.