A Network I Mange
Today, I will give an overview of the voice network that I setup and manage.
It is a hybrid network enabled by Asterisk. Yes, hybrid. It consists of both analog and digital PBX systems, with Asterisk integrating all the systems.
The network consists of the following:
- Panasonic TDA 600 system with over 100 analog phones connected. It has about 8 line data cards, 2 E1 cards (KX-TDA0188) and IP-GW4E (KX-TDA0484)
- Cisco 2800 based UCS with 1 E1 card and about 40 IP phones (a mix of 7940 and 7911 Cisco phones running proprietary SCCP protocol
- Cisco UCS 520 with about 8 units of Cisco 7940 phones
- Panasonic TDA 200 system with about 50 analog phones connected
- Panasonic KX-TA824 with about 20 analog lines and 2 Fixed wireless lines connected
- Asterisk flavour (Elastix)
All the devices (1-5) in the list above connect to the Elastix directly or via an intermediate device.
The Panasonic TDA600 interfaces with Asterisk via the IP-GW4E VoIP card. Natively, this card "speaks" H323 protocol which Asterisk understands and speaks too.
The Cisco systems were connected to the Asterisk via SIP.
The Panasonic TDA 200 and KX-TA824 do not have any VoIP card and so were connected via Quintum Tenor AS devices. The Tenor devices were configured to be SIP-fxo gateways.
The Panasonic user can talk to the Cisco UCS user while the Cisco User can make calls to external lines (mobile and "landlines") via the E1 lines connected to the Panasonic. It also means that Teleconferences can be setup on Elastix and users on analog phone systems attend without much ado.
The network supports and "unlimited" number of calls in all directions except while using H.323 where there are only 4 concurrent calls are allowed by the Panasonic device.
For full details of the features of the Elastix implementation, kindly check on the link below:
In subsequent posts, I shall describe the following:
- Issues encountered with H.323 after upgrade to version 2.30 of Elastix
- Integration of new devices (Alcatel OXO and Avaya IP Office 500) to the network
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