I’m new to FreePBX and Asterisk. I’ve volunteered to install a FreePBX system as part of a building expansion at a small denominational church. We went down this path so that we can have a phone system which permits intercom, paging, etc. rather than for a large number of simultaneous outgoing calls. It would also be nice to have voicemail for the few actual employees.
I would really appreciate a quick check on the the basic plan. We have two external POTS lines and I plan to get a Rhino R4FXO PCI board and use these lines for all outgoing and incoming calls. The internal network will be used for paging, calling extensions and broadcasts with the two outgoing lines being shared among all the phones. Incoming calls will ring some subset of all phones.
I have the O’Reilly Asterisk book, so I think I can get started, but before I buy the FXO card, I just wanted to see if this sort of configuration (using old telephone lines as the trunk) and this card should still work with a modern FreePBX install.
Yes, this will work fine. Depending on volume of calls you may want more than 2 lines. You could aupliment with sip lines. You could also port the current analog numbers to sip depending on the internet situation. Either way you are good
I have a few hybrid POTS/SIP systems under my control with great results. A few things to keep in mind:
If the POTS provider can ‘forward calls on busy’, you could set it up to forward to a VOIP DID so that your PBX can collect voicemail instead of relying on the POTS provider’s voicemail or even worse presenting a busy signal.
Consider the hardware echo cancellation option on the Rhino card. While initially it may seem expensive, if you find yourself spending weeks tweaking settings to make software EC work, it suddenly becomes a bargain.
You don’t have to eliminate the possibility of voip trunking unless your internet connection won’t handle it. My systems are set up with lots of dial patterns in outbound routes so that outbound calls use POTS trunks for local free calls, and VOIP trunks for cheaper long distance calls. Just setting up a voip trunk for outbound redundancy is probably a good idea anyway.