[Asterisk-Users] Small office with all employee's offsite

[Jason Marshall]

> OK, then this is easy. Instal Asterisk in the central location, along with a 
> Sipura SPA-3000. Configure that unit to answer the incoming POTS line and act 
> as a VOIP gateway for Asterisk. Then configure two additional SPA-3000 units, 
> one at each employee's location. Then, configure Asterisk (I recommend 
> Asterisk at Home for your setup, BTW) to route the incoming call to the right 
> extension based on time of day, auto-attendant, whatever. The SPA-3000 units 
> at each remote site will also be able to accept the employee's incoming POTS 
> line and pass that call through to the phone they normally use without 
> resorting to sending it to the Asterisk server and back. (It's all in the 
> SPA-3000 setup.

Very cool indeed.  Thanks Tom!  Now to throw a monkey-wrench into the 
works...  One of the employees spends a lot of time outside of his home 
office, and is then reachable only by cell phone.  But we (for obvious 
reasons) don't want to hand out his cell number to everyone who wants to 
reach him.  So, he will often forward his home phone to his cell, and 
forward the main office number to his home number (so when people call the 
office, they get his cell without realizing it).

Is there any way to use the SPA-3000 at his house to re-route calls (VOIP 
calls, in this case) to his cell?  Or would that have to be done at the 
office where the server is physically.  I'm not clear on whether the 
Asterisk server can control a remote SPA-3000 in this way.

I guess this could be done directly from the Asterisk server, couldn't it? 
It wouldn't be something that could happen automatically; it would have to 
be manually turned on and off.  But it would also require another POTS 
line at the main office for the outbound call -- so I'd rather leverage 
the phone line at his home office to make the outgoing call to his cell 
phone if at all possible...

One more monkey-wrench -- what if I want both of the employees to be on 
the phone at the same time?  Two incoming POTS lines, and two SPA-3000's 
at the office?  Or does it make more sense at that time to get a TDMxx 
card?

> This will not change, you're still looking at three lines in the scenario I 
> outlined above. (Unless you switch to incoming VOIP, but I do *NOT* 
> recommend that.)

Nope, I don't believe in VOIP replacing POTS completely yet.  Maybe in 5 
years...

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| Jason Marshall, marshalj at spots.ab.ca. Spots InterConnect, Inc. Calgary, AB |
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