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Which Asterisk Or Other VoIP System To Deploy?
Posted by
Cliff
on Fri Nov 03, 2006 06:45 AM
from the seeking-advice-and-suggestions dept.
from the seeking-advice-and-suggestions dept.
ubercombatwombat is looking for a bit of advice: "On the 9th of November, I have a meeting to discuss an Asterisk based phone system for a new elementary school. I am the network admin for the district. Currently, we are migrating from a T-1 based Nortel (option 61, 2 x option 11 and 7 x Norstar 8x32's, for those who care) to 1GB data fiber and a 2nd pair per site — to allow simple copper-to-fiber for the split T-1/Norstar's. We also just got a 10MB (scalable to 100MB) connect to the Internet. I can keep the VoIP basically on a separate network if need be as well.
What do I install? Are there Asterisk vendors that are available and have enough experience?"
"The hardware support we can handle just fine, it's the software that's the big issue. One thing to keep in mind is that E911 is priority one for any brand or type. No exceptions. Other than that one thing, the field is fairly open.
I see two possibilities:
- A Cisco system or Shortel system — education budgets vary wildly from year to year and recurring cost have to be kept down.
- Hybrid of Cisco, Snom, or Polycom handsets with a custom Asterisk box with good third-party support. I see a few options such as Fonality or Digium. If anyone is aware of online options with good service, please suggest them.
Trixbox may or may not be what I use. I have had systems going 24/7 for over a year and am very happy, but the product's future is unclear just now.
So, what and who? I won't go there without third-party support. What suggestions can Slashdot offer me?"
I see two possibilities:
- A Cisco system or Shortel system — education budgets vary wildly from year to year and recurring cost have to be kept down.
- Hybrid of Cisco, Snom, or Polycom handsets with a custom Asterisk box with good third-party support. I see a few options such as Fonality or Digium. If anyone is aware of online options with good service, please suggest them.
Trixbox may or may not be what I use. I have had systems going 24/7 for over a year and am very happy, but the product's future is unclear just now.
So, what and who? I won't go there without third-party support. What suggestions can Slashdot offer me?"
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Which Asterisk Or Other VoIP System To Deploy?
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A mac solution (Score:1)
No I'm not a fanboy. I just need a solution also.
Which Asterisk? (Score:2)
Trixbox ? Try freePBX (Score:3, Informative)
(http://groogs.com/)
FreePBX (Score:1)
Layers (Score:3, Informative)
(http://lathama.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday September 06 2005, @03:18PM)
Network Layer - Proper planning and routing on paper a month before install.
Hardware Layer - People care about phones, they may not mention it but they do. For a school where emergancy services are key I would look for a ten year solution. Water cooling, oversized tyan system with raid->lvm->xen->ntp,bind,asterisk,www,tftp,etc...
Software Layer - For optimal performance I would document the current system and call flow. Then redocument it with the receptionist. Submit this to a professional like Digium to work your dialplan and config the needed modules.
Training Layer - Users will have to see some change or they will start complaining that it is not the old system. Be calm and polite, normal personel rules apply.
Documentation Layer - Extension Directories, move-add-changes, redundancy systems. You and others need to know how it all works, and the users need to know who to call.
Two tips for you. (Score:3, Informative)
(http://timgray.blogspot.com/)
#2 - E911 is very easy. you need a real analog line in that area for the e911 outgoing line. set up a dialing rule that routes any 911 calls out that analog line and voila! 911 works perfectly.
Re:Two tips for you. (Score:5, Informative)
Second, he will use T1 lines (PRI) and not a "vonage" like VoIP service. No need for the analog line. One analog line and E911 won't work well for schools anyway. You need to be able to map the exact location in the building for 911. You do this by making sure you have a DID for each phone, and setting the callerID info correctly on outgoing calls. The telco provider will work with you to ensure that the 911 database has the location in the school of each DID number. That way, when the 911 dispacher gets your number, it shows not only the school address, but the exact location in the school of the caller. This system doesn't depend on the phone system at all. What you CAN do is set callerID to the generic main number for all calls EXCEPT 911 (where you send the full DID number) if you normally don't want extensions shown to callee's.
Asterisk (Score:1)
My suggestions (Score:2)
CommuniGate Pro (Score:2)
CommuniGate Pro operates on dozens of platforms [Linux, UNix, Windows, VMS, OS/2...check out their website [stalker.com]]. The same binary that runs a free 5 user license is the same one that operates clusters of millions of users.
Technically, it could replace all computer communications with email/SIP/video/VoIP. Here is an article [pdf] outlining their attempt to expand to home users: HERE [stalker.com]
I forgot to mention Zimbra. (Score:1)
(http://www.legoebay.com/)
Uhh..... (Score:2)
(http://www.grump.org/ | Last Journal: Tuesday January 22 2002, @10:57PM)
school and 911 (Score:1)
Been there, done that. (Score:4, Informative)
(Last Journal: Wednesday May 28 2003, @06:26PM)
- A Cisco system or Shortel system -- Education budgets vary wildly from year to year and reoccurring cost have to be kept down.
I find it laughable that you mention keeping costs down and Cisco or Shoretel in the same sentence. I have a Shoretel system in my office at my current employer, and it's very nice. However, it is also very expensive, and it's less costly than than Cisco... You are factoring in handset costs and extension licensing when you look at the cost of the system, right? Right? You are, right?
The best solution I found (and the one I recommended before I left) is the Rauland Telecenter VI. It gives great bang for the buck and is a highly integrated complete comm system designed for schools, so if you have bell, intercom, and clock systems that need to be upgraded as well, you get to do that nearly for free. It also lets you use Voip phones where you need big feature sets and $10 analog phones where you need "just a phone". Handsets are where a huge portion of the expense of a big phone system deployment go, after all. There also is no per-handset licensing, if I remember correctly. http://www.rauland.com/education/tc6/tc6_home.htm [rauland.com]
Have you looked at Swyx? (Score:1)
Erate and some other notes... (Score:2)
That said, I have very little experience with VoIP. We have not deployed it yet as we were waiting for ERate to help a bit. I have installed and currently have a trixbox running for my personal testing and I had a cisco demo kit (call manager, unity vm, several phones) installed for a few months. As several people mentioned, regardless of solution:
1. Make sure you get good folks to iron out your dial plan. Yours shouldn't be too bad as it's one school, mine has 40 sites off of 5 different CO's, it will be a challenge.
2. Iron out the 911 stuff with your phone company. Also make sure to have analog lines and regular non-powered phones off of them just in case. Make sure the process is documented and trained. (ex. call 911 from your desk, if it doesn't work, alert the office, the office staff will call using the analog line OR dial plan will forward all 911 calls to the office staff first, if no answer, dial 911 for real, etc.) 911 MUST work in all cases. We will be migrating from ISDN phones, which have been known to go down (backhoe's, dead batteries, etc.) so our folks are trained now that if their phone is dead, contact the office which will call 911 from the fax machine or other analog line if needed.
3. The phones are the interface to the people. Don't get cheap ones. The ones that feel cheap will give a bad taste in the users mouths.
I like the trixbox solution, it was easy to set up and get working (Linksys SPA941 and Cisco 7960 hard phones, xmeeting for OS X, X-Lite for OS X and Windows softphones, Cisco 5350 for dialin-out) but I haven't done any dial plan support, just basic call in/out type stuff. HUDLite is neat as a master interface (office/receptionist staff)
The Cisco solution worked great too. It was more difficult to get running with the 5350 for call in/out and there was a delay when placing calls (took a few seconds to ramp up the H323 call to the 5350 and grab the PRI line) The integration and management of the phones was great though. Being able to provision extensions, reset phones, etc. was great. (I believe you can script similar solutions for trixbox, but it's not setup out of the box)
We will most likely be going with the cisco product because that is what we are familiar with (routers, switches, remote survivability, general integration with what we already have, etc.) and it works well. We also are very confident in our VAR in working out our dial plan, E911, etc as well as out line carrier being very familiar with the product.
Chris
Cost? (Score:2)
I am very happy with our Shoretel... (Score:2)
Everything is pretty well thought out:
the trunk testing tool on your pc server shows all activity in real time, and is very very impressive.
All admin is done through a localhost IIS install ASP driven interface. It works very well for my needs - apparently there are some defiencies in templates for advanced soft button programming, but we don't have the need.
Desktop software - the call history, Outlook integration are all very nice.
Fonality. (Score:2)
(http://www.wemissjerry.org/)
Asterisk can be a science project (Score:1)
fonality rules voip (Score:2)
(http://www.mytrip.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday March 04 2006, @03:31AM)
E-rate Eligibility (Score:2)
Cisco (Score:2)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Monday January 31 2005, @05:48PM)
You're district administrators, board members, and tax payers will want something that 1) the current staff can manage, 2) someone else can manage if they ever have staff leave, and 3) get support in case of an emergency. This is one of the scenarios where I recommend a school thinks like a business by purchasing something that makes good strategic economic sense. I am a Linux and OSS bigot but I wouldn't recommend an OSS phone system for your environment. I would recommend something that anyone with a little networking experience can manage. I would recommend something that I can get top-notch support for at 3am when a maintenance window goes south. This is the return on investment for your money people.
There is likely an Asterisk-based solution that will suit your needs but IMHO it's not the best solution for the environment. If you were to ask if I thought you should run Linux servers and Linux lab PCs then I would say oh hell yeah. A phone system is a different beast entirely. It's not simply a new app to learn. You have to develop a completely different mentality towards your management practices. A system like that demands 5 9s at the least and absolutely no downtime if students are on the premise. The potential (but unlikely) cost difference between a commercial solution and an OSS isn't worth the liability if something were to happen while your homegrown phone system was down. Like I said, were this question about servers or some other service then I would say go the OSS route if you have the ability. This is a phone system though. You just can't take the risk.
In closing I would also recommend the Cisco solution because you will get an excellent discount from Cisco through your local VAR. You can also write off the vast majority of it in E-Rate. Best of luck.
Asterisk or not (Score:1)
1. To set up a mini-test system can be done very cheaply. If you can't make it work little or nothing has been lost.
2. It can be configured with either IAX2 or SIP trunks. IAX2 trunks use much less bandwidth than SIP once concurrent calls are being routed over the net. This may not be an issue if you have plenty of bandwidth.
3. Remote extensions are a definite advantage of VoIP, one can connect to the PBX to make calls from home or anywhare a decent network connection is available. This is so only if the extension is an IAX2 extension! If it is a SIP extension it will not get through the firewall which your PBX sits behind. To make it do so is quite complex and simply not worth the effort! If remote extensions increase communications efficiency for the school then asterisk is the only viable option. We can supply freshtel IAX ata's they work very well and can even be used over a dial up connection to facilitate remote extensions. You could also purchase them direct from freshtel.com.au.
4. I don't know how schools work where you are. But in Australia teachers and staff are mobile within the school and often also have students offsite (excursions and camps). We have been able to connect GSM gateways to Asterisk. These gateways can be an asterisk trunk or an extension. This makes the teachers mobile an extension of the PBX.
It works very well and solves the mobility issue without relying on flakely wireless LANS and expensive or extra WiFi phones. This means staff from the school can be contacted through the PBX to mobile and vice versa. There are many advantages to this, for example parents can contact teachers when teachers are away from the school without the teacher having to give their mobile phone number. Peace of mind, security and call tracking are enabled.
Call detail records from the PBX can be used to differentiate personal from mobile calls. Mobile phones do not need Power over Ethernet supply. The UPS would only be needed on the PBX, modems and gateways.
5. In Australia we can purchase business plans from mobile phone carriers. These plans allow calls between the phones in the business group (and the SIMS in the gateway) to be free or almost free. I don't know if this applies where you are.
6. 000 OK. I just realised you are probably in Australia because you asked about 000 and not 911, but I guess you could still be somewhere else. With asterisk 000 is as easy as putting a digium card with an FXO port in the system and a dial plan for 000. Its that simple. 000 will work as long as the PBX is running.
7. Snom phones are probably an overkill to supply throughout the school, our experience is that users only actually use a small proportion of the functions available and never use the rest. Simplicity and Voice Quality are the most relevant factors. Linksys IP phones will do the job easily and provide good call quality with a quality build and feel for
a much lower cost.
8. Support, once hardware is connected support (configurations, trouble shooting, changes adds and so on can be provided remotely). Hardware failure and how quickly it can be responded to is another matter. As the IT guy I would suspect that connecting and replacing hardware would be a simple task for yourself. Once connected and mapped it would be easy for us, or anyone else to maintain.
9. Digium cards. A total IP solution is much simpler and less buggy in our opinion. But most clients wish to retain there existing PSTN phone numbers! Poring an existing PSTN number to an adequate IP provider may or may not be possible. If not the appropriate cards need to be added to the PBX or an IAD devices placed between the PBX and the PSTN.
10. Another advantage of Asterisk is that it is open source. It may also be considered a disadvantage by some. But it does mean you are locked into a particular Vendors hardware, and i
Re:Avaya IP Office (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Sunday January 21 2007, @06:32PM)
I sat around laughing as their support staff stumbled over themselves for 6 months...
You'd think after paying that much $$ the install would have been a HECK of a lot smoother.
Re:Use DUNDi to make free calls to the PSTN in the (Score:1)