[Asterisk-Users] ADSI Phones

[Jayson Vantuyl]

Sorry for the long delay in replying here.

> 1.  What ADSI phone do you use (in production:)),  what is required to get
> them going?
I use Aastra PowerTouch 390s.

> 2.  Can any of the ADSI phones monitor another extension to display a busy
> indicator for that extension?
No.  ADSI provides a screen, softkeys, scriptable buttons, and such, but
it cannot communicate with Asterisk without tying up the line.  As such,
it can't really provide a lot of the out-of-band information that comes
in a PBX.  This has been why I've beens sorely considering actually
manufacturing my own PBX phones for Asterisk.

> 3.  Is there any standard business feature that you can't provide with
> a 1 line ADSI phone + Asterisk(exluding tons of hacking)ie
> hold,transfer by softkey, voicemail by softkey, conference call,
> voicemail MWI etc.?
Hold => check
transfer by softkey => check
voicemail by softkey => check
conference call => check
MWI => check
I can't think of much that can't be done other than the pretty notification 
lights that don't scale beyond the 10-line/user point anyways.

> Is there any advantage to having a 2 or even 3 line ADSI phone?
None that I've seen.  I've seen people try to maintain a call on line 2
while there was an ADSI session happening on line 1 (thus allowing some
interactivity out of band).  This never seemed to amount to a poor,
buggy, hack.

> 4.  It seems the receptionist would be very limited in routing calls.  Voice
> menu is probably not an option.  How have you dealt with that?  Any reason
> not 	do something like this:
I don't understand this question, exactly.  Our receptionists toss calls
around with the ease.  It's not single button transfer, but there is a
certain wisdom in realizing that finding a single button in 200 can be
vastly less efficient than using a paper extension index or DID extensions.

> 5.  Share a source for buying them?
We can deal them.  I can't get my vendor to tell me exactly what part
number to order, but I can get the phones in and resell them at a
competitive price point.  I have the programming codes for the model I
get.  To be honest, the biggest issue blocking ADSI phones is getting a
vendor to be open with you about the codes.  Most ADSI vendors are
selling phones that are to be programmable by a large telco third-party,
not you!!!  Thus, the attitude is often something like "If you
legitimately needed the code, you'd already have it".  This is a tough
nut to crack considering how wary the telco people seem to be about
getting socially engineered.

> Any tips or info/configs would be greatly appreciated.