On Wed, 2006-09-20 at 12:07 -0400, Daniel Howard wrote: > Folks, we may get to experiment with VOIP at Brandon sooner than I > thought! Here's what I was thinking: we want to be able to do local > calls to all student homes, some of which don't have PCs and/or > broadband, so that rules out Skype or the open source stuff I think. Not exactly. There is Skype-out which lets skype call normal POTS lines. > For example, one telephone application I've seen effectively used in > other elementary schools is to have students call their parents from the > classroom when they didn't do their homework, etc. That'll teach 'em! > Another application > is to have conference calls with Nasa experts during their lunch (I > think it was Nasa that had that program), or conceivably parents could > give talks from work during their lunch time. And conference calls with > French schools would be fun for our kids. NASA had the "Lunch with an astronaut" program. I don't know if it is still going on. > > Since we have phone lines run to each room, I'm thinking a Vonage box > with 3 lines (about $100/month) or three VOIP lines from our cable > provider (we already have a cable modem in the school) and a low cost > PBX. And assuming the phone lines have all four wires connected, > teachers could also use the fax capability built into some of their > printers (hmmm, would homework still be late if it was faxed to the room > <grin>). Virtual fax to email gateways are nice, too. Since federal courts established a faxed, signed contract is legally binding, then faxed homework should be OK as well. :) > > We'll need a PBX into which we can plug 40 or so lines, the Asterix open > source PBX would run over $4000 for two of their 24 port cards, not > counting the price of the Linux PC used as the PBX, has anyone tried > this with Asterix? Any other ideas? Unless you _must_ have a physical handset, you don't need the 24 port card. Use a softphone over TCP to connect to the Asterisk server. That drops the cost of the FXS card out. Now all you need is a series of FXO sockets (if you are connecting with a POTS line(s)). This page : http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk is a good starting point. > > Regards, > Daniel > -- James P. Kinney III CEO & Director of Engineering Local Net Solutions,LLC 770-493-8244 http://www.localnetsolutions.com GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics) <jkinney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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