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Using VoIP to Connect Phones Between Offices?
virtualPhoneWire asks: "My office is expanding to include a new facility which is just a few hundred feet just across the parking lot. The building is just far enough away to make running cable a pain in the neck, so to get data over there, we're setting up an 802.11b link, and a couple of simple Linux routers to handle the traffic, no problem. Now, the people in this new building are going to need access to our phone system, a simple Avaya Partner II key system. I would like to think that there is a way that I can patch them into our switch using some kind of
VoIP technology. The ideal being that we can issue a couple of IP phones that plug into the Ethernet back-bone, take their queue from my DHCP server, and linkup with a device on the other end that ties them into switch thus giving them access like any other phone. As an after thought, being able to give other people on our network, both inside the building and via our VPN, access to this gateway to
make calls would be a real bonus. We're considering an upgrade to a real PBX, but we would like to do this without blowing the pension plan. We would like to having something scaleable, and open source, if possible. Any thoughts?"
I used to work for a company that did solutions like that. What we normally did was use ISA Micom cards (FXS). Micom are now owned by Nortel, and last I checked there were thousands of these cards still available through distributers. If you want to roll your own solution, get a rackmount case witha failover power supply, and a small processor ~ 266. Load the _DOS_ software and assign IP's,etc. Tie it into your existing PBX as trunks, and you are set.
If you are not inclined to roll your own, I do recommend Nortel's solutions, quite possibly because they tended to be the most relaible to use.
http://www.linuxtelephony.com/