[Asterisk-Users] FXS or VOIP

[Wilson Pickett]

> I am setting up a phone system for a small office.
> The office will have 5-8 phones and a fax line.
> There are 4 hunt lines coming into the office.

> assumed that I would buy voip phones and connect
> all the phones to a private ethernet network.

You can do this and may it  would be the natural way to start, since
it's cheaper. I'd recommend buying or borrwing one decent phone to do
some testing. I use a Polycom ip500 at home to talk on our office
lines and that works very well at around $220 new.
I also have an iaxY (~$100) at home and can connect any phone I want.
Right now it has a crappy but cordless Seimens on it.

> Is there any reason why I would need to consider using
> analog phones and FXS cards? Seems to me the cheapest
> way is with voip phones and voice quality should be good
> since the phones are on a private network that only has
> voice traffic.

A factor no one here mentions is user psychological comfort. If the
phones are manned by ordinary people, what are they expecting to use
as phones? there are millions of non-geek types out there who would
abhor seeing a Cisco on their desk and want a phone with a few buttons
that works like the phones they've seen all their lives. Not everyone
craves phones that look like the Pentagon offices.

I know because I have two users and they both are using analog phones
to a TDM400 FXS. It happens that I have two X100 FXO for our two POTS
lines and one TDM400 in a P3 box with 512G RAM for the 3 phones. I
have a crummy analogue phone for me just in case, but also have a
Linksys/Sipura and two IAX phones on my desk for testing/evaluation. I
mostly use the Sipura at the moment.

Oh and also, if the asterisk box fails for any reason, having analog
phones can keep phone service available while waiting for the repairs.
Especially good are non-powered phones that will work even while AC
power is off.