Hey Everyone,
I am evaluating Asterisk for use in my company and I love it so far. One question has come up though and I’m having problems answering it.
We would be looking to deploy this to our regional offices. Around 20 or so with 8-20 users per office.
We would also be using a local voice gateway (like a AC-MP114/118) for local outbound/inbound traffic for each office.
We would want to maintain only a single Asterisk/Freepbx pbx instance though.
I realize the limitations and danger of maintaining a single pbx for multiple sites. However, there are other reasons that make this attractive for us.
I’ve read many different solutions for multiple remote sites, however all of them I find seem to be using one voice gateway.
I am wondering if there is anyway to create regions/locations within asterisk so you could in effect have a dialplan with otherwise conflicting entries.
for example.
Site 1: Nxxxxxx goes out gateway 1 but never gateway 2.
Site 1: 911 goes out gateway 1 but never gateway 2.
Site 2: Nxxxxxx goes out gateway 2 but never gateway 1.
Site 2: 911 goes out gateway 2 but never gateway 1.
We would be using Polycom phones at all the sites, mostly IP335’s if it makes a diff.
Thanks all, this is a great product.
Sure you can have a dialplan per phone if you want. Effectively you want to cost outbound paths. Calls should always search from least costly (in terms of financial, network resources and quality) to most costly.
You need to take a more holistic design to the project, frankly this is the least of your problems with a centralized WAN based design.
What type of IP transport are you going to be using between the remote location and the PBX? That’s where you need to do your start.
The good news is the Polycom phones support an internal dial plan for emergency dialing that can use a local gateway (bypassing the need for the Asterisk B2BUA functionality in emergency scenarios).
The IP Transport will vary based on office size, some small offices will just use a cable modem and a ASA, some may have a fiber link back to one of our nodes. The transport is already up and that layer is managed by another team, my team is only responsible for the telephony side of things (Standing up the pbx and deploying/managing the phones)
I am familiar with the emergency dialing plan on Polycom phones, and while this will be in place for 911 purposes we would need something easier to manage than having to touch each phone for setting a dialplan.
If we have say 150 phones out there at a number of diff offices manually updating a per-phone config for outbound dialing would not be ideal.
We are evaluating Asterisk due to it’s cost (Free 
) we currently have another SIP based PBX in place running our call centers and it does support regonlization