Re: Best Way to Distribute BT phone to 12 rooms in house ?

["UKHA" <ukha@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 11/10/2004 at 12:31 christopher purves wrote:

>Could you explain a little more :) I know pretty much nothing about
VOIP
>I'm
>afraid.
>
>I have factored in 6 cat5 points in every room in the house though and
>figured I the phone will go along one of them - possibly to a pabx as
>suggested in the previous post to this thread.
>
>
>Chris

Ok,

One of the reasons for looking at a voip solution rather than patching the
lines to a room is so obvious, people often miss it. If you suddenly
realise that you really needed to put 7 sockets in a room and not 6 (say
for speakers etc) you could simply place a mini network switch in the room
and plug all the computer/telephony stuff into that. ie if you had a PC and
an IP phone, you could (if short of sockets) plug the switch into 1 socket
and hang the phone and PC off the switch. What's more, if you decide you
want to add another phone you simply configure it and your gateway and it's
done, anywhere you have a network port you can have a phone. In fact you
can even use Ethernet over Power adaptors where you 'forgot' to put a
network point. Of course the additional beauty of VOIP is that you can make
free calls to other people (see http://www.freeworlddialup.com )

Since you've factored in CAT5, lets look at using that. IP phones are just
like any other piece of network kit, this means you can move them about the
house, plug them into any network port etc.


Phones
======

IP 'phones' come in 2 types:

Phone devices : Look and feel like a phone, some have extra large screens,
and can do funky stuff.
ATA devices :  ATA = Analog terminal adaptor - just a box into which you
plug a standard analog phone (or dect base station if you like) via it's
FXS port. Some ATA's offer FXO ports too

Phones/ATA devices speak all sorts of protocols and use all sorts of
codecs, H.323 is older now and SIP seems to be replacing it (v slowly).
Personally, if you have a pretty good network, I'd use SIP and g711
internally

FXS = Foreign eXchange Station - a port you plug a phone into
FXO = Foreign eXchange Office - a port you plug a phone line into
Protocols = what 'language' the phone speaks' eg H.323, SIP, IAX2, MGCP
Codec = What sort of compression they use. All devices should be able to
speak g.711 (ulaw/alaw) as a bare minimum, this is a hi bandwidth codec.
ilbc is a lower rate codec.


Voip Gateway / PBX
================

Using something like Asterisk as your central pbx allows you to use a mix
of voip, analog and digital connections to create a seamless phone system.
Additional features such as Voicemail, IVR's etc are all possible.

Asterisk is free (GPL) and runs under linux. If you aren't a linux guru
take a look at my Asterisk Live CD! http://www.automated.it/asterisk
about half way down - make sure you get build 1.6...

You should be able to burn it and boot a pc from it. In it's initial state
it wont do much, but you can configure it and if you have a USB cf card
reader you can save configs on that...

You could also use SER but you are going to be limited in the feature
deparment....



Typically (or more accurately what I do) is :

1) IP phones -> asterisk -> PSTN

2) IP phones -> asterisk -> Internet -> IP Phone

3) IP phones -> asterisk -> Internet -> asterisk -> PSTN

4) PSTN -> internet -> asterisk -> IP phones

IP Phones in my case actually means IP phones and DECT handsets via an
analog card.


HTH

If you need any more, or it's not clear, gimmie a shout

Andy