situation is as follows- I work on a closed site, we don’t get good cell reception and for various reasons radio’s don’t suit our needs so I was asked to set up a intercom system. we have 2 remote sites, only connected via a free space optics network bridge, so it needs to be IP based. They of course then asked if I could try to make it video as well. So after looking into it I realized I just need to make a pseudo VOIP PBX system and use local extensions to try and achieve this.
My understanding thus far is that there is a way to set up an extension to page and have all the phones auto pick up and pass through to speaker the page so that it is basically an intercom. I called grandstream and they told me that the phone itself supports it but that there needs to be a command added to the SIP header (I think I have the wording right, but I may not, please forgive me) in order for the phone to know what to do.
I was hoping that someone could tell me if this is possible, how hard it is and where I may be able to find a few instructions on how to do it. I just don’t want to order all this hardware and be stuck with something that doesn’t work.
Thank you
I haven’t purchased the units yet as I want to make sure it can do what I want before I tell work that it can and they order it all. Trying to avoid looking stupid.
In my opinion the Grandstreams are garbage. They will do what you want however they are beyond cheap in construction.
The Aastra’s, Polycom’s and SNOM’s will all do what you want and are well built phones that are easily integrated with Asterisk/FreePBX (especially the Aastra’s)
The Polycom’s are the highest quality of all of them, they are also the most expensive.
I did a quick search for video phones by them and was unable to find any, do you know of a phone you’d recommend for this situation that is a video phone too?
The only other potentially manufacture to look at would be Cisco but that is a double edge sword. Cisco really only support there phones on Cisco gear. But they are also of excellent quality and they do have video phones. Just know that they are harder to deal with and setup then the others. They also own Linksys and some of there stuff is decent.
I’d recommend finding a dealer you can work with that will maybe give you a try before you buy program. We did that 3 years ago with a company called e4 technologies out of the Chicago area (http://www.8774e4voip.com). The deal was we prepaid for several different models and got to play with them for 30 days, then as long as we purchased something from them we received all the money we pre-paid towards our final purchase and returned those we didn’t want), otherwise there was a 10% restock fee. I’m sure there are other dealers with other programs like that.
When you do that you really get to compare good versus bad models. We ended up with Aastra units which for the budget we had we love. Cisco phones which I had used in the past were just out of the budget or we would have gone that route.
where can I find an idea of the cisco costs? I can’t seem to find on the web a quote for their call manager center hardware, my budget isn’t really an issue so much, we can pay double for better quality.
Don’t buy the phone system you’ll regret it just the phones. I used to manage one…
That’s the other problem with Cisco you need to talk to a authorized dealer and boy will you get the hard sell for them to sell you a complete package at some insane price.
But some dealers around can sell you the phones. You’ll want the phones with SIP licensing not SCCP. It’s been a while wince I looked but 18 months ago 7960’s were in the $350-400 range and we purchased Aastra phones for half that price…
I am not sure where the video comment came from. Certainly Asterisk only supports point to point video. Cisco does not have a phone with a SIP video client and a camera.
The Cisco phones also do not support the standard notify intercom methods.
The best deals on Cisco are on eBay. If anyone has a burning desire to buy Cisco endpoints without having to hear the Call Manager spiel I can help you out.