On Mon, 2005-11-14 at 12:21 +0100, Markos Paraskevopulos wrote: > Hello everyone, > > I’m new to VoIP and despite a lot of reading, I’m kind of more > confused than before. > I had an asterisk system up and running then read some dox and becuase what I read at that time wasnt well written it has that effect :)
asteriskdocs.org is pretty good, and the oreilly book asterisk and the future of telephony (pdf is available at asteriskdocs.org) is a good read, and only takes about 1 night to read everything except the appendices. > I have following question – we currently have hardware Alcatel PBX and > approx. 50 phones in the company. I was wondering if we would need to > change the phone service provider, because they don’t provide VoIP > services if we were about to switch to Asterisk instead of the Alcatel > PBX? > Asterisk does more than VoIP. It can speak analog (both fxs and fxo - or act like a phone company (fxs) or act like a phone (fxo)), it can also do digital trunks (t1/e1/j1 - ds3 soon alledgly). While it can replace a pbx it can also provide a T1 to a pbx. It can talk to the phone company via VoIP or whatever circuits you already have. You dont *have* to switch phone companies if you dont want to, and it doesnt always make sense to switch. > Or can Asterisk maintain current functionality plus adding VoIP by > simply switching the alcatel pbx for Asterisk server? > If you want to add VoIP you can do this more gradually if you dont have the budget to totally replace 100%. Asterisk can feed your current pbx with phone service, where it interconnects to can be either VoIP or PSTN or both. Eventually you can migrate off what you already have. If however you have the budget to replace every phone on the desktop (or get appropriate interface equipment so the phones can speak to asterisk) then asterisk should be able to maintain current functionality plus adding anything that it does that you dont have (ie VoIP). > I hope I’m making at least a bit of sense. > I hope my answer makes sense.. > -- Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com Bret McDanel UK +44 870 340 4605 Germany +49 801 777 555 3402 US +1 360 207 0479 or +1 516 687 5200 FreeWorldDialup: 635378 http://www.sacaug.org/ Sacramento Asterisk Users Group
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
_______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation sponsored by Easynews.com -- Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users