Tag: Technical

In late 2005 We we approached to replace an aging Panasonic system for a British Public School.
The driving force for moving to voip was that the site was spread over a wide area and different buildings and to provide telephones to the remote buildings would prove too expensive.
The system was replaced with a central Asterisk server with nearly 80 extensions. The core LAN was upgraded to Netgear Layer 3 switches with Powerdsine POE midspans.
The remote buildings added extra complexity as one was on the other side of a public road.

To overcome this, this building was connected to the main site via a “Point to Point” Wifi link. The other building was closer and could be connected via a Fibre Link between the it and the main building.

The system was configured to use account codes in public areas, These handsets can only make emergency or internal calls unless a validated account code is entered.
The handsets used were a mix of Aastra 480i and 9133i because of build quality, reliability and BLF support.

The system has now been in place for over 2 and a half years now and in that time the only faults have been either ISDN failing or cable faults. This is a great demonstration of the reliabilty of Asterisk and Aastra handsets and voip in general.

UPDATE

We have since writing this post updated the system on new hardware as part of a refresh. They are now running on a newer version of Asterisk and have more buildings connected to the network.

We were approached to provide a Voip solution for a London Solicitors. They were moving from a Single office to two offices in different parts of the city.

At the Primary office we installed an Asterisk server that was connected to the ISDN30e link where all DDI numbers were delivered for both sites. This site also had its own VOip connection as well

At the main site the operators were based using the Asternic FlashOsPanel for displaying extension status for both sites.

A key feature of the system was to provide a flexible system for out of hours callers to contact the duty Solicitor. This was provided so that callers on calling out of hours  can leave a message for the next day or press an option to contact the Duty solicitor. The Duty solicitor can call into the system and change the contact number at will if for example they are busy with a client.

A SIP trunk connected both sites together over a 20Meg link that was used for both voice and data.

The new sites were not in the exchange area of the original phone number so this was ported to Gradwell.net so that it could be delivered via an IAX2 connection to the relevent server.

The handsets used were a mixture of Aastra 53i and 55i with an xml appliction to set DND status in the Flash ops panel and light the light on the handset.