Old Plans, New Plans

I'm sure everyone will be shocked: we have a change in plans!  Unfortunately, this change of plans is that we're substantially delaying our Asterisk implementation.  As we looked at our new construction project, getting phones configured and installed in time, and exercising even moderate stewardship, just wasn't looking good.

We narrowed things down to three basic options.

1. Continue to use our current phones system, which means pulling copper to the new building.  This is by far our easiest solution, and fairly low expense.  It just means we're adding expense to a system we eventually want to get rid of.
2. Do an integrated solution, putting Asterisk only in the new building and other strategic places.  A lot more expensive, a lot more complication, and a lot to later throw away.
3. Do the full Asterisk solution (which might be a commercial derivative).  The most expensive, the nicest solution, and nothing to throw away.  Just too costly, time and dollars, for our race into that new building.

After lots of heart-wrenching discussion, we chose #1.  That was actually my suggestion, even with great reluctance.  That means we won't be touching Asterisk for months.  Darn!  Of course, it means we won't quite be killing ourselves between now and August 30.  Sure hope that's the right trade.

Comments

[Joel Lingenfelter]

I totally understand your decision, but integrating them isn't nearly as hard or expensive as you'd think. We replaced our voicemail with asterisk, and then tied the two systems together for not very much money. We have had some echo problems, mostly related to our old system, and we are about ready to pull the trigger on having the T1 go directly into the asterisk instead of going analog through the old switch first. We're still in testing though.

While the asterisk stuff is easier than you'd think and better than it should be, it isn't trivial, and if I had to move into a building by August I'd go with option 1 as well. You are simply out of time to test and deploy properly.

One option is to pull Cat-5e or Cat-6 and then terminate it to phone jacks (using only one pair of course). Then when you pull the phones out, you simply have to reterminate the cable ends and you can deploy the VOIP phones in place. This beats pulling a bunch of useless cat-3 IMHO.

Joel

[Jon]

Just to confirm Joel's comment above... we found the integration to be fairly straight forward. While beta testing we put 10 of us on Asterisk. All it took was a desktop PC, 1 Digium T1 card and a T1 crossover cable. We connected it to our Nortel and routed the 10 extensions down the T1 to Asterisk.

Now that we're live and fully off the Nortel we use the T1 card to connect directly to Qwest.