[Asterisk-Users] A new pbx for an office in the UK

[phil]

Steve B wrote:

>My office is wanting to replace their pbx as it doesn't support enough extensions. They have 8 incoming lines, one of which are dedicated to alarms and one is for the fax machine. The other 6 are for the ordinary phones. They have about 10 analog extensions but want to increase this to about 20.
>
>They've been quoted about £4500 for a new pbx.
>
>My question is could I use Asterisk to do this cheaper? What hardware would I need? and would this work in the UK? And, perhaps, what else do I need to know about their present set up in order to ask the right questions?
>
>I know little about phone systems but I am familiar with programming and network administration (Linux & Windows).
>
>TIA,
>Steve
>
>
>
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We are UK based and had a similar requirement and are mid conversion. We 
opted to junk our analogue lines and move to an ISDN 30, initially with 
8 lines but we are going to up this to 30 once it's proven. You could 
 either keep your analogue lines and get a channel bank with 8 fxo ports 
or in the long term it's better to move to ISDN as after the install 
cost, the rental is about the same.

Our hardware now consists of a digium E1 card (30 Exch lines) a digium 
T1 card to talk to the channel bank. An Adtran TSU 600 with 24fxs ports  
(£270 on Ebay) which gives up 24 extensions. A Compaq 1600R (ebay £250) 
dedicated server but any spare machine will do. Don't bother trying to 
find E1 channel banks as they are very very rare and expensive and no 
better than the T1's.

Total cost appx £1250 plus the cost of the phones & a bit of shipping. 
Any standard pots will work and we use our old Panasonic speakerphones 
for this.

The cost of the ISDN install adds appx 1K to this but it allows you to 
have ddi's so our 8 lines have 24 numbers.

All in all I'd say it can be done very cheaply and effectively. It seems 
rock solid and we are currently messing with the dialplans and IVR etc 
before we go live. I'm a programmer but linux newbie and have found it 
fairly painless to get up and running with most questions answered on 
this mailing list.

Hope this helps

Phil